The Proclamation of the President of the United States, of the 19th of April, 1861, is a complete and perfect denunciation of this threatened crime of piracy, the purpose to recur to which had been manifested by a public declaration of Jefferson Davis, which had invited, from all quarters of the globe, privateers to prey upon the commerce of the United States. I need not say to your honors that when our Government has pronounced this to be piracy, and to be not within the law of nations, under its discretion to determine whether it will recognize an inchoate nationality, this Court has not, any more than has a Court of England or France, the power to say that what its Government does not choose to recognize, even in the quality of belligerents, it will recognize. What our Government has said shall remain in the quality of criminality, must so remain, notwithstanding this proclamation of Jefferson Davis, or any commission that may issue in pursuance of it.
I apprehend that even if we were to bring ourselves into the paradoxical condition of passing judgment on this question as a disinterested, yet sovereign nation, your honors would find in the acts of the Government a complete denunciation against this proceeding as a crime of piracy, and a complete policy, which the Court must follow, leaving any diplomatic considerations of the results which may follow its mistaken, if you please, construction of its duty, to be disposed of by the authorities that are responsible for it.
_Mr. Brady:_ I believe there is no proof of any such action by the legislative branch of this Government.
_Mr. Evarts:_ I apprehend that the whole course of the legislation of this country shows that we do not recognize or tolerate this contest as a thing that is rightfully to go on. That is all that is necessary.
I say, if the Court please, that the course of an external sovereignty, in these intestine quarrels, turns upon the point whether it will give its sanction to an intrusion upon the peace of the world by an inchoate nation, and I am trying to consider that question as if our Government had passed judgment upon it _ab extra_; and I say that the action of our Government shows that we do not intend to recognize it as something that should be allowed to go on. These considerations, as to any recognition by this Court of rights derivable from _quasi_, pretended, nascent, public powers, would induce this Court to follow the decision of the Government, in case we were judging of the question as a controversy between parts of another nation.