Supreme Judicial Court which sat in Essex, a few weeks after the murder, moved for a Habeas Corpus ad Testificandum, and Hatch was carried in chains to Ipswich, and on his testimony, wholly false, a bill of indictment was found against Richard Crowningsheld and three other persons, who were arrested and committed for trial.

Richard Crowningshield did not despond at first in his imprisonment, because he knew he was charged with the crime on false testimony; but a month after, when he heard that some of his accomplices had turned States' evidence, and disclosed the truth, his heart failed him, as he contemplated the seeming desperateness of his condition, and soon abandoning all for lost, he committed suicide, to escape a public ignominious death; while if he had boldly stood the chances of a trial before a jury, he needs must have been acquitted, notwithstanding all the disclosures, for want of sufficient legal testimony-the disclosures, so far as he was concerned, having been mere hearsay, which is not, technically, evidence. But, from want of moral courage, he committed suicide, and suicide was confession.

Joseph J. Knapp, it will be recollected, consented at one time to be States' evidence, and to make a full confession of the whole truth; had he remained steadfast to this compact with the government, he would thereby have saved his own life, and, by his testimony, acquitted his brother Francis. His testimony would have proved that Francis was in Brownstreet-the locale of the murder-without the knowledge and

against the wishes of Richard Crowningshield, and that his sole purpose in going there was to ascertain from him, historically, whether the deed had been done. It was proved at the trial, that Francis was in Brown-street at the time of the murder, and the jury from all the evidence, and in the absence of any proof that he was there for any other purpose than to aid Richard Crowningshield, came to the conclusion, that he was there expressly for that purpose; and, consequently, found him guilty as PRINCIPAL. his brother's testimony. But this very confession of Joseph Knapp, though withdrawn before trial, and thus, technically, ruled out of court, must have produced some influence upon the minds of the jury disastrous to the defendants. A rule of law could prevent the admission of the testimony into court, but not into the minds of men: This confession revealed certain facts-admitted as evidence through the person to whom they were made known-such as the concealment of the club by which Crowningshield perpetrated the murder, and other auxiliary circumstances, without which it might have been difficult to have obtained conviction. Thus, by his double weakness-first in confessing, and then retracting— Joseph Knapp accomplished his brother's conviction of a crime which was perpetrated for his own benefit.

He was thus convicted for want of

Some censure at the time was passed upon the conduct of the defence. The eminent counsel, it was thought, committed the fatal error of bringing forward no plan, hypothesis or theory which could admit of the innocence of the accused,

but contented himself rather with a kind of guerilla warfare, attacking the positions or witnesses of the other side, in a series of flying skirmishes. A kind of defence, which, in criminal cases, never has succeeded, and probably never will.

It was thought also at the time, that the learned counsel for the defence betrayed a want of professional equanimity, if not courtesy, that they made too many and too lachrymose complaints of the professional aid the prosecuting officer retained on the trial, compelling Mr. Webster to say to the jury, that, "In the course of his whole life, he had never before heard so much said about the particular counsel who happen to be employed; as if it were extraordinary that other counsel than the usual officers of the government should be assisting in the conducting of a case on the part of the government." And that they exhibited, in fine, indications of too captious a spirit, and too irascible temperament.

The opinion in regard to the management of the prosecution was warmly approbatory. It was, indeed, generally admitted that, but for Mr. Webster's masterly argument, a conviction would never have been procured against the prisoners. The earnest and resistless logic, by which he demonstrated the necessity of their guilt, dispelled the doubts which had hung over the case from complicated and contradictory evidence. Their moral guilt might have been suspected, their legal guilt, without him, could not have been established.

The closing words of his argument, in which he reminds the jury of the obligation they were under to discharge their duty,

have been quoted before, but may not be unworthy of repetition here: "A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning and dwell in the utmost parts of the sea, duty performed, or duty violated, is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light, our obligations are yet with us. We cannot escape their power, nor fly from their presence. They are with us in this life, will be with us at its close; and, in that scene of inconceivable solemnity, which lies yet farther onward, we shall still find ourselves surrounded by the consciousness of duty, to pain us wherever it has been violated, and to console us, so far as God may have given us grace to perform it."

CHAPTER IX.

Soon after the reply to Hayne, the principles of constitutional law evolved therefrom, were put to the severest test. The fatal doctrine of nullification, brought boldly forward in Colonel Hayne's argument, for the first time, gained, during the two years that followed, a strength, and following in a certain section, sufficient to create a feeling of sincere apprehension on the part of the friends of the Union.

The motives of actors we can judge of solely from their revelation in deeds. There is no process, moral or legal, to reach the conscience. As does a man, so, to all possible understanding, he thinks. The reasons assigned, so liberally and authoritatively at times, for the conduct of public men, by the historian or biographer, are those rather of the writer than actor, in a generality of cases.

The narrator can give facts, from which each intelligent reader for himself is able to draw satisfactory conclusions.

Within a year of the famous controversy between Mr. Webster and Colonel Hayne, Mr. Van Buren and Mr. Forsyth, availing themselves of the fortuitous circumstance of a femi