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7 The Tertium Quid The pathos which from rival eyes Unwilling tears could summon, The stinging taunt, the fiery burst of hatred scarcely human! it seemed all official Washington packed into the senate chamber for the trial of Justice samuel Chase. Republican house members who brought the charges sat alongside sullen Federalists anticipating another defeat. intrigued cabinet officers sat next to intently interested supreme Court justices . The benches and tables were covered in crimson cloth; the visiting ladies were covered in high fashion. “The most perfect order and silence is preserved thru the house,” henry st. George Tucker wrote, “notwithstanding the great crowds.”1 Glittering as impressively as the gold braid of the visiting foreign ministers was Chase’s defense team. it consisted of Joseph hopkinson, a rising star of the Philadelphia bar; Philip Barton Key, a London-trained attorney and brother of Francis scott Key; Robert Goodloe harper, a former representative from south Carolina and former senator from Maryland; and Charles Lee, former attorney general of the United states. The lead defense counsel was Luther Martin, attorney general of Maryland, the most tenacious trial lawyer of his day, and a man who “knew more law drunk than the managers did sober.”2 Chase’s attorneys and the house managers sat in chairs and at tables covered with blue cloth bordering the center aisle. surveying it all was the presiding officer, a man under as much legal scrutiny as Justice Chase: vice-President Aaron Burr. With high drama and high stakes, the trial was called to order on February 4, 1805. Justice Chase unfurled an aggressive defense. Where facts cleared him, they were assiduously detailed. Where the law was in his favor, it was expounded upon at length. Where the articles were vague, they were exposed 88 the TerTium Quid 89 and dismissed. Where Chase’s rulings were affirmed by other judges—as was the case in six of the eight articles—the rulings were pointedly exhibited . Law, facts, and precedent mingled with the not-so-subtle insinuation that politics, not the Constitution, was driving the prosecution. Countering the Republican theory of impeachment, Chase’s attorneys articulated a high standard. Judges could be removed “only for treason, bribery, and corruption , or other high crime or misdemeanor.” There must be “some act done or omitted, in violation of some law forbidding or commanding it.” Each article , they argued, failed to meet that standard. Chase’s opinion in the Fries case was grounded in precedent, “and surely he need not urge to this honorable Court, the correctness, the importance, and the absolute necessity of adhering to principles of law once established.”3 he denied bias in Callender ’s case and dismissed as “altogether erroneous” the allegations regarding his conduct in newcastle.4 his comments to the Baltimore grand jury were but “an argument, the force of which as a patriot he might feel, and which as a free man he had a right to advance.”5 Defiance was mixed with humility , brilliance with the debility of age, partisanship with patriotism. Chase concluded by appealing his case to “his omnipotent Judge . . . for the rectitude and purity of his conduct as to all the matters of which he is this day accused.”6 The rhetorical talents that so well served John Randolph on the floor of the house, that delighted the freeholders of southside virginia, and that animated the revolutionary reforms of the seventh Congress, were ill suited for a legal proceeding. impeachment by the house of Representatives was a political process, but the Constitution had transformed the senate chamber into a courtroom, the senators into jurors. Randolph made no corresponding adjustment to his deportment. There before him sat Justice Chase, the personification of the final Federalist stronghold Republicans meant to overcome. Clutching the articles of impeachment instead of his whip, Randolph knew but one way to proceed: head-on, at daggers drawn. on February 9, Randolph opened the case for the prosecution. he complained of the “severe pressure of disease” and, remarkably, that the prosecution had been allotted little time to consider Chase’s statement. he would proceed, however, because he stood “on impregnable ground.”7 For the following hour and a half, Randolph became tangled in the legal traps he had unwittingly laid out in the multiple count articles.8 At no point did he clearly articulate the managers’ theory of impeachment, namely, that impeachment and removal constituted the only remedy for misuse of power [18.118.7.85] Project MUSE (2024...

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