phere of hostility on the part of the Administration's
followers, there can be little doubt that the Court did
not welcome the fact that one of the first and most
important cases which it was called upon to decide
presented a question, the decision of which seemed
likely to place it in conflict with one of the leading
political contentions of the Administration. For sev-
eral years, the impressment of American seamen and
especially of naturalized Americans by the British
had been one of the chief causes of friction in the in-
ternational relations of this country. England main-
tained with vigor that, as under its common law no
British citizen could volimtarily expatriate himself,
it had a right to take oflP of American ships any former
British citizen, even though he were naturalized in the
United States. Less than a year before, in June, 1807,
the outrageous attack of the British frigate Leopard
on the Chesapeake had raised the issue in its most
serious concrete form. The President and the State
Department had for many years stoutly denied the
British contention, both as matter of law and matter
of right. Yet as early as 1799, Chief Justice Ellsworth,
in the case of Isaac Williams in the Circuit Court,
had upheld the English law as to expatriation. The
question had arisen in several cases in the Supreme
Court, but a decision on the point had never been
squarely made. In Mcllvaine v. Coxe^s Lessee^ 2
Cranch, 280, 4 Cranch, 209, it was now presented in
a case involving the right of a native of New Jersey,
who had become a loyalist refugee after 1776, to in-
herit land in that State. The case had been first
argued in 1805, by William Tilghman and Jared In-
gersoU for the right of expatriation against William
Rawle and Richard Stockton. "The doctrines ad-
vanced upon the present occasion," said IngersoU,
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