Mr. Read, the senior counsel for the defence, followed in an elaborate and searching argument. No part of the case was left untouched. The only report of his remarks to which we have access, is very meagre, not as full as that of the latter part of Mr. Brent’s speech. He alluded in opening to the monstrous doctrine that the Constitution allowed a master the right of seizing his slave wherever found, without even offering to establish his identity, as had been alleged to be the Law by those who had commented upon the case of kidnapping from Chamberlain’s house. Prosecutions and abuse for not sanctioning such outrages as these, were equivalent to saying, “if you do not turn negro catcher, we will indict you for treason.”
He continued with a rapid and striking sketch of English history, throughout the period from which the cases relied upon by the prosecution had been selected,--reviewing it reign by reign, showing with great force the barbarous and tyrannical character of the times, whose principles it was attempted to write into the Constitution of America in the nineteenth century. Having laid this general foundation, he proceeded to discuss at length each particular case that had been cited; and not confining himself to the mere face of the report, he searched out the facts from an array of collateral authorities, such as was probably never before submitted to any Court in any State trial, exhibiting the state of parties, the influences at work upon the Bench and the Juries, the character of the Judges, and the real value which ought to be attached to their decisions. Coming down to the later periods of English Jurisprudence, he insisted that even their Courts had abandoned these principles, and would not now listen to the authorities which the prosecution had attempted to enforce in Republican America; and showed conclusively that at the present day in England, no man could be convicted of treason in levying war, unless an open insurrection or rebellion were actually raging in the land, and aiming at the change or destruction of the Government. Passing next to the American decisions, he argued, that stripped of the improper phraseology in which some of them had been clothed, they established the same doctrine, and that when this phraseology appeared to cover wider grounds, it had been derived from earlier English cases, which at the time of making the decisions were supposed by our Judges to be the actually existing law of England, our lawyers then not having the means of exposing their utter worthlessness.