FEES OF UNITED STATES MARSHALS AND

CLERKS.

Remarks in the House of Representatives, Monday, February 22, 1841-In Committee of the Whole on the General Appropriation bill, on the amendment of Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi, in relation to the fees of Marshals, Clerks, &c.

Mr. A. G. BROWN said the proposition of his colleague was the only one for which he could vote. That amendment proposed to reduce the fees of officers in the District and Circuit Courts of the United States to a standard with the fees of officers performing like services in the courts of the several states; and it further provided that the fee bill in the federal courts should in all after time conform to the fee bills of the state courts. This was right. The fee bills of the state courts were under the control of the legislatures of the respective states; and there was not, in his judgment, the slightest danger but that the people would always exercise sufficient control over their immediate representatives to force such a regulation of the fees of law officers as should be acceptable to themselves. He believed there was no community in the Government who would object to pay marshals and clerks of the United States courts the same fees that were paid to clerks and sheriffs of state courts; and he was quite certain that no people would be willing to pay more. Pass then the amendment of his colleague, and you would do all that you ought to do-all that the people command you to do on this subject. You leave the fee bill in the federal courts to be regulated by local legislation. There was a peculiar fitness in this. Services in some states were worth more than like services in other states. The legislature of New York was the best judge of what the issuance of a subpoena, or the service of a capias, was worth in that state; and the legislature of his own state (Mississippi) was most competent to adjust all such matters in that state. If Congress undertook to pass a general fee bill, it must necessarily do injustice to some of the states, since that bill, which conforms to the interest of the South, may be much too heavy for the North, where labor is generally much lower; and every one knew it was worth more to discharge the duties of marshal or sheriff, in a sparsely populated country, than in one densely settled. At all events, there could be no harm in leaving this matter entirely in the hands of the respective state legislatures. The proposition of his colleague [Mr. Thompson] proposed to place it there, and to permit it to remain through all after time.

The bill, as reported from the Committee of Ways and Means, he deemed a political enormity. What does that bill propose? Why, sir, not to reduce the fees, but to collect from the unfortunate debtor the enormous sums which you have always forced from him with such miserable twaddle as that clerks and marshals are not permitted to retain the money, but compelled to pay it over to the United States Treasury--as though it was a matter of any sort of consequence to the plundered man whether the money which you had thus forced from him went into the

pockets of an officer or the vaults of a bankrupt Treasury. For one, if this system of legalized plunder was to be kept up, he desired, so far as his own state was concerned, that the clerks and marshals might have the benefit of it. In that event, meritorious citizens in Mississippi would derive some benefit from your cruelty to the unfortunate; and the aggregate wealth of the state would not be diminished. But pay it into the Treasury of the United States, and what goes with it? It is lost to us and ours for ever. It goes to build up light-houses, harbors, and to make other improvements in your Eastern States; and the gross amount of the wealth of Mississippi is diminished to the full amount of the money thus unrighteously abstracted from the pockets of his indebted constituents, and strained through the hands of federal officers into the vaults of the nation. His constituents had asked to be released from this ONEROUS taxation, and you propose to quiet their supplications by taking their money to build light-houses and other things for the benefit of other states. Sir, this is not the relief asked for, and it is an insult to the people thus to respond to their petitions. If you take the money from the poor litigant, let the marshal and clerk keep it. The people of Mississippi had already been forced to pay five times their just quota for the support of Government under the tariff laws and land laws of the United States; and now you propose to levy a tax of seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars per annum, and call it relief. Believe me, Mr. Chairman, my unfortunate constituents have had a surfeit of just such relief.

But, Mr. Chairman, I have another and insuperable objection to the bill as reported by the committee, or as proposed to be amended by the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Johnson], and that objection is one founded on what I deem to be a just and proper construction of the Constitution. If I have read that instrument aright, it secures equality in taxation to all the people of this Confederacy; and what do you propose to do by this bill? Why, sir, to collect off of about two thousand defendant suitors and citizens of Mississippi, eighty-five thousand dollars in the way of tax on lawsuits. Of this sum, you propose to give to the marshal ten thousand dollars as a maximum of his compensation, and to pay the remainder into the United States Treasury. Is that equality of taxation which exacts from two thousand citizens of Mississippi, who are so unfortunate as to become suitors in your federal court, a tax of seventy-five thousand dollars, whilst you exempt from similar taxation the remaining thirty-five thousand who are not suitors in that court? Is that equality of taxation which exacts seventy-five thousand dollars from two thousand citizens of Mississippi, and not one cent from the five hundred thousand who live in Ohio? Is that equality of taxation which exacts of me fifty dollars, because I am so unfortunate as to be sued, and yet exempts entirely my neighbor or my brother, who is not sued? Is that equality of taxation which exacts of the unfortunate debtor thousands and tens of thousands, and not one cent from the unembarrassed and unindebted part of the community? And does any man seriously pretend that this will not be the result if this law is passed? Is it not in fact avowed, in all parts of the House, that this will be the result? And have not defences been attempted to be set up for this political monstrosity?

Sir, you have no authority to raise revenue in this way; and if you had, it would be a monstrous abuse of power to exercise your authority. I would not have one dollar of revenue collected in this way;-such illgotten gain-gotten in violation of the Constitution-wrung from the unfortunate debtor-coined, as it were, from the flesh of a tortured citizen, I should expect to turn to slimy reptiles and to hissing adders, that would besmear the vaults of your Treasury with their filth, and sting, as with a deadly poison, each hand that dared remove them. I cannot, I will not, vote for any maximum compensation-to do so is to fix a contingency on the suffering, of which this ill-gotten treasure enures to the nation. You have no authority to fix any such contingency. You have no authority to take one dollar of money collected in this way, though there were millions wrung from the unhappy citizen. I will vote for the proposition of my colleague, and I shall do so with great pleasure; but when this is done, I shall have done all that I can or will do. I shall not be accused of voting against a maximum through party motives, for before this law goes into effect-if it passes at all-there will probably not be a political friend of mine in any office in the republic within the gift of the Executive, that is worth asking for. I claim to give the vote which I shall give, against the original proposition, and against the amendment of my friend from Tennessee [Mr. Johnson], in obedience to my sense of justice to my constituents, and my duty to the Constitution, and to these alone.

ADDRESS

TO THE PEOPLE OF MISSISSIPPI, PREVIOUS TO THE GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION IN 1843.

FELLOW-CITIZENS: Having been presented to you by a portion of my political friends, as a candidate for Governor, I beg to trespass so far upon your attention as to declare succinctly the principles by which I shall be governed in the event of my election. Aware that the chief magistrate of a single state can exert but a limited influence over the general politics of the country, I am also aware that such officers are seldom chosen but in reference to their views on questions of a national character. Not being responsible for the establishment of this custom, long recognised and practised upon as strictly orthodox by both political parties, no apology can be expected from me if I conform to it.

I have mingled some little in the party contests of the day, and most of you are aware that I claim to be a Republican in that sense in which the term was used and understood in 1798, '99, and 1800. Unfortunately, however, this simple annunciation nowadays proves nothing, since men of all creeds claim the proud title of Republicans of '98. The men who were most vociferous in their denunciations of Republicans, when Federalism was in the ascendant, and down to the very hour of the final overthrow of that monstrous political heresy, are now loudest in their pretensions to pure and undefiled Republicanism. Within the

last three years, I have heard the man who first moved the resolutions that convened the Hartford Convention, declare on the floor of Congress, that he was every inch a Republican, and that Thomas Jefferson was the incarnation of Federal Loco Focoism, and it is notorious that many of the bitterest revilers of Jefferson, Madison, Taylor of Caroline, and the Spartan band, who made Virginia the Thermopylæ for resisting the march of federal millions, are now rejoicing in the title of Republican Whig. Fortunately there's nothing in a name. If I were required to define my political creed, in two words, they would be "Madison's report;" for, in my judgment, that paper, containing as it does a luminous exposition of the principles set forth in the Virginia resolutions, is the very quintessence of Republicanism. The Kentucky resolutions went a step further, and them, too, I endorse.

I am for the currency of the Constitution. I am a hard-money man, a bullionist. There is no grant in the Constitution for the erection of engines, mills, and other machines for the manufacture of paper money. The framers of the Constitution were hard-money men-they had profited by the sad example of England and France in the seventeenth century, and the no less melancholy fate of the colonies, growing out of their connection with continental notes and other paper currencies, and they determined to exempt the new government from such baleful influences, and declared that it should have the power to coin money and regulate its value, and then stopped-and nowhere is there given to this government of their creation, this government of limited powers, any authority over the currency, other than that just mentioned-to coin money and to regulate the value of foreign coin. Paper money is unknown to the Constitution. Our forefathers purposely excluded a thing of such contaminating influence from an instrument which they intended should always be pure.

The government of the United States is one of limited powers. It can do no act except what it is specially authorized to do, or such other acts as are absolutely necessary in carrying out the expressly delegated powers. By its principles all political power is inherent in the people, to whom the law-makers are immediately responsible. These last, consisting of a President, Senate, and House of Representatives, have plenary authority to legislate within the scope of the Constitution, whilst they respectively are in office, and their successors have the same powers. No one body of legislators has the constitutional ability to usurp the power of legislation beyond the period of their election-and it follows, of course, that if the late Congress had passed a law and given to it a certain prospective operation for a definite period of time, and such law should prove obnoxious to the next Congress, they would have the right to repeal it, whether it was a simple enactment or assumed the more imposing form of a charter or act of incorporation.

The government of the United States ought to confine its operations to the purposes of its creation-and doing this it will legislate on such subjects as all the states are equally interested in. It will so legislate as not to oppress any one or more of the states, and it will strictly abstain from all interference with matters merely local in their character. It will collect its debts and pay its dues in the currency of the Constitution, and abstain from all entangling, corrupting, and dangerous connection with the local currency of the country. It will use the

national treasury for national purposes--neither squandering it on works local in their character, nor dividing it with a prodigal hand among the states in unequal and unjust proportions, in the vain hope of buying the great states to support a particular aspirant to the presidency, at the expense and even pauperism of the small states. It will so levy taxes that each state, and every section of each state, shall bear equally, as near as may be, the burthens of government. It will foster all our various interests, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, manufactures, professional, &c., but it will protect no one at the expense of any one, or all the rest. It will protect our soil from the dishonor of foreign pillage or invasion, and it will, if need be, with all the energies of this mighty nation, protect our glorious flag from the dishonor of being rudely touched by the insolent myrmidons of Great Britain. It will demand for itself that respect and honor from the other nations of the earth, to which a country, boasting of seventeen millions of freemen, is justly entitled--and I trust in God we never shall again consent to treat with Great Britain or any other nation for soil which is unquestionably our own, and purchase a dishonorable peace by the surrender of our territory. "The honor and independence of my country are the gods of my idolatry," and if war is ever to be averted, at the expense of these, then I say, let it come, let it come.

On the subject of our state affairs, I am more particularly called upon to address you. The question of the Union Bank bonds, and their payment, is the first in point of magnitude, and this I will first consider. The legislature, at its session in January, 1841, resolved that the state would pay this debt-from this decision an appeal was taken to the people, and in November, 1841, after months of patient investigation, that tribunal pronounced its judgment against the bonds. I supposed that an intelligent people knew, what they were about, and that when they spoke they meant what they said; but other gentlemen think differently; and the people, in the approaching canvass, are to be invoked to reverse the solemn decision pronounced by them in 1841. Will they do it? is a question which awakens inquiries at once vital to the Constitution and to the future prosperity of the state.

I believe that the pretended bonds, issued on account of the Mississippi Union Bank, find no sanction in the Constitution, but that they were issued in violation of that sacred instrument, which every good citizen in his heart is sworn to support, and that on this account, if for no other reason, there never did exist any sort of obligation, moral or constitutional, on the part of the state, to pay these bonds, or any part of them.

I believe that the bonds were not sold in conformity to the pretended law under which they issued, and I am of opinion that an undertaking to pay them would be to sanction a most dangerous infraction of the Constitution, and to lay the foundation for the final ruin and bankruptcy of the state. Be not deceived, fellow-citizens, by those who tell you that this vast debt, with all its accumulating interest, will be paid without resort to taxation. As certain as that there is a God, if any payment is ever made, it will be from the hard earnings of our people. You will be told that the Union Bank will be put in liquidation for the payment of this debt: believe me, fellow-citizens, the chief assets of that