Trial of the Officers and Crew of the Privateer Savannah on the Charge of Piracy Part 30

_Q._ Did you then talk with them?

_A._ No, sir; I addressed myself to the Commissioner in adjourning the case.

_Q._ Was there any examination proceeded with?

_A._ There was no examination.

_Q._ State what you said to the prisoners, the object of your calling, and what their reply was. I ask, first, did you make a memorandum at the time?

_A._ I did, sir.

_Q._ Was it made at the very time you asked the questions?

_A._ I took paper and pencil in hand, and asked the questions which you requested, and took a note of it.

_Q._ What was the object of your calling upon them?

_A._ To ask them where they were born; and, if born elsewhere, were they naturalized.

_Q._ Did you state for what purpose you made this inquiry?

_A._ I do not recollect that I made any statement to the prisoners for what purpose I wanted the information. I told them I wanted it. They seemed to recognize me as a.s.sistant District Attorney; and as to those that did not recognize me, I told them I was a.s.sistant District Attorney. The memorandum produced is the one I made at the time.

_Q._ Referring to that, give the statements that were made by each of the prisoners in reply to your questions?

_A._ Henry Cashman Howard said he was born in Beaufort, North Carolina.

Charles Sydney Pa.s.salaigue said he was born in Charleston, South Carolina.

Joseph Cruse del Carno said he was born in Manilla, in the Chinese Seas, and was never naturalized.

Thomas Harrison Baker said he was born in Philadelphia.

John Harleston said he was born in Anderson District, or County, in South Carolina.

Patrick Daly was born in Belfast, Ireland. Has never been naturalized.

William C. Clarke born in Hamburg, Germany. Never naturalized.

Henry Oman born in Canton. Never was naturalized.

Martin Galvin born in the County Clare, Ireland. Not naturalized.

Richard Palmer born in Edinburgh. Never naturalized.

Alexander C. Coid was born in Galloway, Scotland. Was naturalized in Charleston,--about 1854 or 1855, he thinks.

John Murphy born in Ireland. Never naturalized.

_Mr. Brady_: We will insist, hereafter, that this admission of naturalization cannot be used at all.

_Mr. Evarts_: We will concede that.

_By Mr. Smith_: Do you remember asking the prisoners for their full names?

_A._ I asked them particularly for their full names.

_Q._ Are they correctly stated in the indictment?

_A._ They are stated from the memorandum which I then took; that is my only means of recollection.

_Mr. Smith_: The a.s.sistant District Attorney desires me to state that he did not know that he was to be called as a witness in the case; that if he had had any idea that he would be called as a witness, he would not have made the visit. Yesterday, for the first time, he ascertained that he would be called. I would also state that I did not send him there for the purpose of making him a witness, but with the object of obtaining particulars which might render the allegations in the indictment entirely accurate in respect to every detail.

_Mr. Smith_ added: I now close the case for the prosecution.

OPENING FOR THE DEFENCE.

Mr. LAROCQUE opened the case for the defence. He said:

_May it please the Court, and you, Gentlemen of the Jury_:

We have now reached that stage in this interesting trial where the duty has been a.s.signed to me, by my a.s.sociates in this defence, of presenting to you the state of facts and the rules of law on which we expect to ask from you an acquittal of these prisoners. I could wish that it had been a.s.signed to some one more able to present it to you than myself, for I feel the weight of this case pressing upon me, from various considerations connected with it, in a manner almost overpowering. I think that we have proceeded far enough in this case for you to have perceived that it is one of the most interesting trials that ever took place on the continent of America, if not in the civilized world. For the first time, certainly in this controversy, twelve men are put on trial for their lives, before twelve other men, as pirates and--as has been well expressed to you by the learned District Attorney who opened this case on behalf of the prosecution--as enemies of the human race. If you have had time, in the exciting progress of this trial, to reflect in your own minds as to what the import of these words was, it must certainly, ere this, have occurred to you that, in regard to these prisoners, whatever may be the legal consequences of the acts charged upon them, it was a misapplication of the term. Look for a moment, gentlemen, first, at the position of things in our country under which this trial takes place. All these prisoners come before you from a far distant section of the country.

Some of them were not born there--some of them were. At the time when these events occurred all of the prisoners lived there, and were identified with that country, with its welfare, with its Government, whatever it was. They had there their homes, their families, everything which attaches a man to the spot in which he lives. Those of them who had not been born in America had sought it as an asylum. They had come from distant regions of the earth--some from the Chinese Sea and the remote East--because they had been taught there that America was the freest land on the globe. They had lived there for years. Suddenly they had seen the country convulsed from one end to the other. They had seen hostile armies arrayed against each other, the combatants being for the most part divided by geographical lines as to the place where they were born or as to the State in which they lived. This very morning a newspaper in the city of New York estimates the numbers thus arrayed in hostility against each other at no less than seven hundred thousand souls. These prisoners have the misfortune, as I say, of being placed on their trial far from their homes. They have been now in confinement and under arrest on this charge for some four or five months. During that whole period they have had no opportunity whatever of communicating with their friends or relatives. Intercourse has been cut off. They have had no opportunity of procuring means to meet their necessary expenses, or even to fee counsel in their defence. Without the solace of the company of their families, immured in a prison among those who, unfortunately, from friends and fellow-countrymen have become enemies, they are now placed in this Court on trial for their lives. You will certainly reflect, gentlemen, that it was not for a case of this kind that any statute punis.h.i.+ng the crime of piracy was ever intended to be enacted. You will reflect, when you come to consider this case, after the evidence shall have been laid before you, and after you have received instructions from the Court, that however by technical construction our ingenious friends on the other side may endeavor to force on your minds the conviction that this was a case intended to be provided for by statutes pa.s.sed in the year 1790, and by statutes pa.s.sed in the year 1820,--it is a monstrous stretch of the provisions of those statutes to ask for a conviction in a case of this kind. And I may be permitted, with very great respect for the const.i.tutional authorities of our Government, to which we all owe our allegiance and respect, to wonder that this case has been brought for trial before you. I cannot help, under the circ.u.mstances surrounding these trials--for while you are sitting here, another jury is pa.s.sing on a similar case in the neighboring City of Philadelphia--attributing the determination of the Government to submit these cases to the judicial tribunals at this time to a desire to satisfy the mind of the community itself, which has been naturally excited on this subject, that these men are not pirates within the meaning of the law. And I do most sincerely hope, for the credit of our Government, that that is the object which it has in view, and that the heart of every officer of the Government, at Was.h.i.+ngton or elsewhere, will be most rejoiced at the verdict of acquittal, which, I trust, on every consideration, you will p.r.o.nounce. We all know that in a time of civil commotion and civil war like this, the minds of the people, particularly at the incipient stages of the controversy, become terribly excited and aroused. We could not listen, at the outbreak of these commotions, to any other name but that of pirate or traitor, as connected with those arrayed against our Government and countrymen. One of the misfortunes of a time of popular excitement like this is, that it pervades not only the minds of the community, but reaches the public halls of legislation, and the executive and administrative departments of the Government. And it is no disrespect, even to the Chief Magistrate of the country to say, that he might, in a time like this, put forward proclamations and announce a determination to do what his more sober judgment would tell him it was imprudent to announce his intention of doing. You will all probably recollect that when this outbreak occurred the Government at Was.h.i.+ngton announced the determination of treating those who might be captured on board of privateers fitted out in the Confederate States as pirates.

Such an announcement once made, it is difficult to depart from. And therefore I do most sincerely hope that the administration in Was.h.i.+ngton, as my heart tells me must be the case, are looking at these trials in progress here and in Philadelphia, with an earnest desire that the voice of the Juries shall be the voice of acquittal,--thus disembarra.s.sing the Government of the trammels of a proclamation which it were better, perhaps, had never been issued. This civil war had at that time reached no such proportions as those which it has since acquired. It was then a mere beginning of a revolution. The cry was, that Was.h.i.+ngton was in danger. There were no hostile forces arrayed on the opposite sides of the Potomac. There was a fear that they would soon make their appearance; and there was also an earnest hope--which I lament most deeply has not been realized--that that outbreak would be stopped in its commencement, and that no armies approaching to the proportions of those which have since been in hostile conflict would be arrayed on the field of battle. Look at the state of things now.

Scarcely a day elapses on which battles are not taking place, from one end to the other of this broad continent--in Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and other States--and where the opposing forces are not larger than those that met in any battle of the Revolution which gave this country its independence. Does humanity, which rules war as well as peace, permit that while whole States, forming almost one half of the Confederacy; have arrayed themselves as one man--for aught we know to the contrary--while they think, no matter how mistakenly, that they have grievances to be redressed, and that they have a right to exercise that privilege of electing their own Government, which we claimed for ourselves in the day of our own Revolution--does humanity, I say, permit, in such a state of things, one side or the other to treat its opponents as pirates and robbers, as enemies of the human race?

Gentlemen, our brave men who are fighting our battles on land and sea have a deep interest in this question; and if the votes of our whole army could be taken on the question of whether, as a matter of State policy, these men should be treated as pirates and robbers, I believe, in my heart, that an almost unanimous vote would go up from its ranks not to permit such a state of things to take place.

I wish to say a word here, gentlemen, preliminarily, on another subject, and that is, what the duty and right of counsel is on a trial of this kind. I hold the doctrine that counsel, when he appears in Court to defend the life of one man, much less the lives of twelve men, is the _alter ego_ of his clients--that he has no trammels on his lips, and that his conscience, and his duty to G.o.d, and to his profession, must direct him in his best efforts to save the lives of his clients,--and that it becomes his duty; regardless of all other considerations, except adherence to truth and the laws of rect.i.tude, to present every argument for his clients which influenced their minds when they embarked in the enterprise for which they are placed before the Jury on trial for their lives. It is not the fault of counsel, in a case of this kind, if he is obliged to call the attention of the Jury to the past history of his own country, to the cotemporaneous expositions of its Const.i.tution, to the decisions of its Courts of Judicature, and of the highest Court of the Union, which have laid down doctrines with reference to the Const.i.tution of the Government, which are accepted at the present day, entirely incompatible with the success of this prosecution. In doing so, you will certainly perceive that, however much these men on trial for their lives may have been deceived and deluded, as I sincerely think they have been to a very great extent, and, as was frankly admitted by the learned counsel who opened the case for the prosecution, that at least, there was the strongest excuse for that deception and delusion among those of them who had read the Const.i.tution of their Government, who had read its Declaration of Independence, who had read the cotemporaneous exposition of its Const.i.tution, put forward by the wisest of the men who framed it, and on the honeyed accents of whose lips the plain citizens of the States reposed when they adopted the Const.i.tution. If it had been their good fortune to be familiar with the decisions of its Courts, they had learned what the Supreme Court had said with reference to the sovereign rights of the States, and with reference to the strict limit and measure of power which they had conceded to the General Government, and there was, at least, a very strong excuse for their following those doctrines, however unpopular they may have become in a later day of the Republic.

One of the reasons why I most regret that the Government has thought fit to force these cases to trial at the present time is, that it forces the counsel for the prisoners, in the solemn discharge of their duty to their clients, whose lives hang in the balance, to call the attention of the Jury and the attention of the public to those doctrines, doing which, under other circ.u.mstances, might be considered as a needless interference with the efforts of the Government to restore peace to the country. But, as I say, I hold that our clients in this case have a right to all the resources of intelligence with which it has pleased G.o.d to bless their counsel. They have a right to every pulsation of their hearts, and I do not know that I can sum up the whole subject in more appropriate language than that used by the Marquis of Beccaria, which was quoted by John Adams on the trial of some British soldiers in Boston, who, in a time of great public excitement, had shot some citizens, and were placed on trial for their lives before a Jury in Boston. He quoted and adopted on that occasion, as his own, these memorable words of that great philanthropist: "If I can be but the instrument of saving one human life, his blessing and tears of grat.i.tude will be a sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind." I hold, with John Adams, that counsel on a trial like this has no right to let any earthly consideration interfere with the full and free discharge of his duty to his client; and in what I have to say, and in my course on this trial, I will be actuated by that feeling, and by none other. And, gentlemen, I love my country when I say that; I feel as deep a stake in her prosperity as does any man within the hearing of my voice, and as deep a stake as any man who lives under the protection of her flag.

The Jury have a great and solemn duty to discharge on this occasion.

They have the great and solemn duty to discharge of forgetting, if possible, that they are Americans, and of thinking, for the moment, that they have been transformed into subjects of other lands; of forgetting that there is a North or a South, an East or a West, and of remembering only that these twelve men are in peril of their lives, and that this Jury is to judge whether they have feloniously and piratically, with a criminal intent, done the act for which it is claimed their lives are forfeited to their country. I wish to dispel from the minds of the Jury, at the outset of this case, an illusion which has been attempted to be produced on them, with no improper motive, I am sure, by the counsel who opened the case on the part of the Government--that this trial is a mere matter of form. I tell you, gentlemen, that it is a trial involving the lives of twelve men, and this Jury are bound to a.s.sume, from the beginning to the end of the case, that if their verdict shall p.r.o.nounce these men guilty of the crime of piracy, with which they are charged, every one of them will as surely terminate his life on the scaffold, as the sun will rise on the morrow of the day on which the verdict shall be p.r.o.nounced. We have nothing to do with what the Government in its justice and clemency may see fit to do after that verdict has been p.r.o.nounced. We are bound to believe that the Government does not put these men upon their trial with an intention to make the verdict, if it shall be one of guilty, a mere idle mockery. I, for one, while I love my country, and wish its Government to enjoy the respect of the whole world, would not be willing to believe that it would perform a solemn farce of that kind; and, gentlemen, as you value the peace and repose of your own consciences, you will, in the progress of this trial, from its beginning to its end, look on it in this light, and in none other.

Now, gentlemen, what is the crime of piracy, as we have all been taught to understand it from our cradle? My learned friend has given one definition of what a pirate is, by saying that he is the enemy of the human race. And how does his crime commence? Is it blazoned, before he starts on his wicked career, in the full light of the sun, or is it hatched in secret? Does it commence openly and frankly, with the eyes of his fellow-citizens looking on from the time that the design is conceived, or does it originate in the dark forecastle of some vessel on the seas, manned by wicked men, to whom murder and robbery have been familiar from their earliest days, and who usually commence by murdering the crew of the vessel, the safety of which has been partly entrusted to them? And when the first deed of wickedness has been done which makes pirates and outcasts of the men who perpetrated it, what is their career from that moment to the time when they end their lives, probably on the scaffold? Is it not one of utter disregard to the laws of G.o.d and man, and to those of humanity? Is it not a succession of deeds of cruelty, of rapine, of pillage, of wanton destruction? Who ever heard of pirates who, in the first place, commenced the execution of their design by public placards posted in the streets of a populous city like Charleston, approved of by their fellow-citizens of a great and populous city, and not only by them, but by the people of ten great and populous States? And who ever heard of pirates who, coming upon a vessel that was within the limits of the commission under which they were acting, took her as a prize, with an apology to her Captain for the necessity of depriving him of his property, and claiming to act under the authority of ten great and populous States, and under that authority alone? And who ever heard of pirates doing what has been testified to in this case by the witnesses for the Government,--taking one s.h.i.+p because she belonged to the enemies of the Confederate States, to which they sincerely believed they owed the duty of allegiance, and pa.s.sing immediately under the stern of another vessel, because they knew by her build and appearance that she was a British vessel, and not an enemy of their country, as they believed?

But, gentlemen, the difficulties with which the prosecution had to contend, in making out this case, are too great to be lost sight of; and the Jury must certainly have seen how utterly preposterous it is to characterize as piracy acts of this kind. Who ever heard of a pirate who, having seized a prize, put a prize-crew on board of her, sent her home to his native port--a great and civilized city, in a great and populous country--to be submitted to the adjudication of the Courts in that city, and to be disposed of as the authorities of his home should direct? I beg to call your attention to the facts that have been brought out on the testimony for the prosecution itself--that, in regard to this vessel, instead of her crew having been murdered--instead of helpless women and children having been sent to a watery grave, after having suffered, perhaps, still greater indignities--that not a hair of the head of any one was touched,--that not a man suffered a wound or an indignity of any kind--that they were sent, as prisoners of war, into the neighboring port of Georgetown, where, in due time, by decree of a court, the vessel was condemned and sold--and the prisoners, having been kept in confinement some time as prisoners of war, were released, and have been enabled to come into Court and testify before you.

Comparing this case, gentlemen, with the cases which are constantly occurring in the land, what earthly motive can you conceive, on the part of the Government, for having made the distinction between these poor prisoners, taken on board of this paltry little vessel of 40 or 50 tons, and the great bands in arms in all parts of the country? Look what occurred a little while ago in Western Virginia, where a large force of men, in open arms against the Government, who had been carrying ravage and destruction through that populous country, and over all parts of it, were captured as prisoners. Were any of those men sent before a court, to be tried for their lives? Did not the commanding officer of the forces there, acting under the authorization, and with the approval, of the Government, release every one of those men, on his parole of honor not to bear arms any more against the country? And what earthly motive can be conceived for making the distinction which is attempted to be made between these men and those? Shall it be said, to the disgrace of our country--for it would be a disgrace if it could be justly said--that we had not courage and confidence enough in our own resources to believe that we would be able to cope with these adversaries in the field in fair and equal warfare? Gentlemen, I think it would be a cowardly act, which would redound to the lasting disgrace of the country, to have it said, one century or two centuries hence, that, in this great time of our country's troubles and trials, eighteen States of this Confederacy, infinitely the most populous, infinitely the most wealthy, abounding in resources, with a powerful army and navy, were obliged to resort to the halter or the ax for the purpose of intimidating those who were in arms against them. I do not think that any one of this Jury would be willing to have such a thing said.

Now, gentlemen, with regard to the conduct of these men, an impression has been attempted to be created on your minds by one circ.u.mstance, and that is, that at the time of the capture of the Joseph by the Savannah the American flag was hoisted on board the Savannah, and that the Joseph came down to her, and permitted her to approach from the false security and confidence occasioned by that circ.u.mstance. The time has now arrived to dispel the illusion from your mind that there was anything reprehensible in that, or anything in it not warranted by the strictest rules of honor and of naval warfare. Why, gentlemen, I could not give you a more complete parallel on that subject than one which occurred at the time of the chase of the Const.i.tution by a British fleet of men-of-war, and the escape of the Const.i.tution from which fleet at that time reflected such lasting honor on our country and her naval history. You will all recollect that the Const.i.tution, near the coast of our country, fell in with and was chased for several days by a large British fleet. Let me read to you one short sentence, showing what occurred at that time. I read from Cooper's Naval History:

"The scene, on the morning of this day, was very beautiful, and of great interest to the lovers of nautical exhibitions. The weather was mild and lovely, the sea smooth as a pond, and there was quite wind enough to remove the necessity of any of the extraordinary means of getting ahead that had been so freely used during the previous eight and forty hours. All the English vessels had got on the same tack with the Const.i.tution again, and the five frigates were clouds of canvas, from their trucks to the water. Including the American s.h.i.+p, eleven sail were in sight; and shortly after a twelfth appeared to windward; that was soon ascertained to be an American merchantman. But the enemy were too intent on the Const.i.tution to regard anything else, and though it would have been easy to capture the s.h.i.+ps to leeward, no attention appears to have been paid to them. _With a view, however, to deceive the s.h.i.+p to windward, they hoisted American colors, when the Const.i.tution set an English ensign, by way of warning the stranger to keep aloof._"

After that, I hope we will hear no more about the Savannah having hoisted the American flag for the purpose of inducing the Joseph to approach her.