the first prosecution of an American citizen for aiding
the French,[1] and the Anti-Federalists were loud in
their denunciation of the Government. "It is important to have the principle on which Henfield was arrested developed," said the National Gazette. "If they
were arrested on the strength of the proclamation,
the free men of this country have degenerated into
subjects. This process ... by the Executive authority . . . involves a question of the first magnitude
to Americans, and that is, whether they are subjects
of the United States, or citizens/* And again it said:
"His arrest . . . is an infringement of those rights
which it is presumed every American citizen possesses . . ; it has occasioned serious alarm in the
breasts of the citizens in general, who are without
the vortex of British influence." It stated that an
American citizen entering into the service of belligerent
powers put himself beyond the jurisdiction of the United
States, and it denied that the English doctrine of
inalienable allegiance existed in the United States.[2]
"Their papers sounded the alarm," wrote Marshall later, "and it was universally asked 'what law had been offended and under what statute was the indictment
supported? Were the American people prepared to give to a proclamation the force of a legislative act, and to submit themselves to the will of the Executive?
- ↑ In reply to a protest by the French Minister, Genet, Jefferson wrote that the Henfield matter would be examined "by a jury of his countrymen in the presence of Judges of learning and integrity." Jefferson, VII, June 1, 1793. There had been a previous arrest of an American citizen, Gideon Olmstead, for serving as an oflBcer on a French privateer in violation of the President's Proclamation; and he had been bound over for indictment in the District Court in North Carolina in July, 1793. Columbian Centinal, July 6, 1793.
- ↑ See Independent Chronicle, June 13, 20, 1793; the New York Daily Advertiser, another Anti-Federalist paper, reported, July 29, 1793, that the grand jury had indicted "divers persons for having caused sundry vessels in the port of Philadelphia to be armed and equipped in a warlike manner, being an infraction of certain treaties and a direct violation of the neutrality of the United States declared by the Presidents Proclamation."
