Even if it did, no proof existed that
this expedition was organized in New York. On the contrary, it was
known that Miranda had gone hence to Jacquemel, and had made his
preparations there, in a port out of our jurisdiction.
This point made, they boldly went a step farther, and declared that the
United States were actually at war with Spain. The affair of the
Kempers, and of Flanagan in Louisiana, the obstruction of the Mobile
Kiver, the depredations upon our commerce by Spanish privateers, were
sufficient proof of a state of war. We had a right to meet force by
force. The President must have been of this opinion, else he could not
have violated his trust by authorizing this expedition.
The case for the defence, considered in a logical point of view, was
desperate; but no case is desperate before a Jury; and when Mr. Colden,
Mr. Hoffman, and Mr. Emmet had each in his own peculiar mode of
eloquence appealed to the Jury to protect their client, already
punished by removal from his place, without a trial or even a hearing,
for an offence committed with, the sanction of his superior
officers,--when they compared this State prosecution to the attempts
made by despotic European governments to crush innocent men by the
machinery of law, and asserted that it was instituted solely to gratify
the malice of the King of Spain, a bitter enemy to the United
States,--and when they enlarged upon the grandeur of an undertaking to
give liberty to the down-trodden victims of Colonial tyranny, comparing
Miranda and his friends to our own Revolutionary heroes, there could be
but little doubt of the verdict.
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