to the satisfaction of every unprejudiced mind to be
perfectly consistent with the principles of the Constitution and to be founded on the wisest maxims of policy.
The Judge concluded with calling the attention of the
Grand Jury to the present situation of the country and
with remarks on the mild and virtuous administration
of the government.[1] The fact that such political
charges were praised by the Federalist papers as "replete with sound principles and the very essence of
Federalism", and as being "among the more vigorous
productions of the American pen. . . .
In these useful
addresses to the jury, we not only discern legal information, conveyed in a style at once popular and condensed,
but much political and constitutional knowledge",[2]
served to enhance the indignation of the Anti-Federalists. And their apprehensions were not dispelled by
the defense made by a Federalist Congressman, James
A. Bayard, that though the Judges had been charged
- ↑ Charge to the Grand Jury in New Jersey by Judge Iredell, Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, April 10, 1799.
- ↑ Farmer's Weekly Museum (Walpole, N. H.), Sept. 8, 1798, June 17, 1799. See also Oracle of the Day (Portsmouth, N. H.), May 26, 1788. In New Jersey Gazette, April 12, 1795, there is a report of a charge of Judge Iredell to the Circuit Court Grand Jury in New Jersey in which he gave at length his views on the Jay Treaty —a topic of excited political discussion; and the Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, April 19, 1797, reports a charge of Judge Iredell to the Grand Jury in Pennsylvania, dealing with the duties of a citizen not to give "hostile assistance to any of the warring powers",— a subject on which there was heated political division; see ibid., April 19, 1798, containing a letter praising a charge by Judge Chase. Judge Cushing in a charge to the Grand Jury in Virginia, Sept. 23, 1798, portrayed the horrors of the French Revolution and urged them to be on their guard against French wiles and "the plot against the rights of Nations and of man- kind and against all religion, and virtue, order and decency." Judge Bay of the United States District Court in South Carolina, in a charge to the Grand Jury, Nov., 1798, praised President Adams, appealed for support to his Administration and denounced the "recalcitrant few" in South Carolina who indulged in partisan antagonism. Carolina Gazette, Dec. 27, 1798; South Carolina Federalists, in Amer. Hist. Rev. (1909). The Oracle of the Day, May 24, 1800, described “a most elegant and appropriate" charge of Judge Paterson: "The law was laid down in a masterly manner. Politics were set in their true light; by holding up the Jacobins as the disorganization of our happy country and the only instruments of intro- ducing discontent and dissatisfaction among the well-meaning part of the commu- nity.' The “Jacobins” thus referred to by the Judge were his political opponents, the Anti-Federalists.
