CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



887 



" Such a scene as the room of this court presented 

 nn that election day him never before been witnessed 

 in tliis i -it y or in this country, and it is tn be hoped 

 never will again. From early morning until after the 

 polls wi-ro cloned those rooms were packed and jammed 

 with a mu88 of prisoners and marshals. Not only were 

 they crowded beyond their capacity, but the hafts and 

 i-orriilors wore thronged with those who were unable 

 to obtain admission ; so that the counsel representing 

 the prisoners and the bondsmen who were to be offered 

 to secure their release had the greatest difficulty and 

 \\iro frequently unsuccessful in obtaining entrance. 

 In addition to all this was this delectable iron ' pen ' 

 on the upper floor, in which men were crowded until 

 it resembled the 'black hole of Calcutta,' and where 

 they were kept for hours, hungry, thirsty, and suffer- 

 ing in every way, until their cases could be reached. 

 With scarcely an exception these men had gone to the 

 polls expecting to be absent but a short time. Many 

 of them were thinly clad. Numbers had sick wives 

 or relatives ; some were sick themselves. There were 

 carmen who had left their horses standing in the pub- 

 lic streets ; men whose situations depended upon their 

 speedy return ; men who wished to leave the city on 

 certain ^trains. Every imaginable vexation, inconve- 

 nience, injury, and wrong which the mind can conceive 

 existed in their cases, so that it was painful for the 

 counsel who were endeavoring to secure their release 

 to approach sufficiently near the railing to hear their 

 piteous appeals and witness the distress which they 

 had no power to alleviate. And over all this pushing, 

 struggling, complaining crowd, Mr. Commissioner 

 John!. Davenport sat supreme with a sort of oriental 

 magnificence, calmly indifferent to everything but the 

 single fact that no man who was arrested was allowed 

 to vote. And after all this tremendous exhibition of 

 the power of this great Government, after this exhibi- 

 tion of what a United States commissioner and chief 

 supervisor of elections can do if he has a mind to, 

 what was the result? Surely if the offenses which 

 these persons had committed were of so grave a nature 

 as to require these wholesale proceedings, if the mor- 

 als, the peace, and outraged laws of the community 

 required to be vindicated by the summary arrest of 

 four thousand persons on a single day, it was certainly 

 necessary that the law should be enforced to the end, 

 and that the offenses which were so dangerous as to 

 require this arbitrary action should be punished. But 

 nothing of the kind was done. As these men were 

 brought up before the three commissioners who sat in 

 judgment, they were asked if they had voted. If they 

 nacT not, they were required to promise that they would 

 not do so. If, to escape the terrors of Ludlow street 

 jail, they surrendered their rights as American citizens 

 and made the promise thus exacted, as the great ma- 

 jority of necessity did, they were released upon their 

 own recognizance. If they did not, they were held to 

 bail. If they had voted, although if not properly nat- 

 uralized sucn vote was an additional offense instead of 

 a palliation for the crime charged against them, they 

 were immediately released. After sundown, when 

 the polls were closed and it was too late for any one 

 to vote, the doors appear to have been thrown open 

 and all set at liberty. 



_ " This scene occurred, not in the imperial 

 city of Berlin, where despotism is striving to 

 roll back the tide of time, but in the metropo- 

 lis of this land of freedom, in the free city 

 of the sovereign State of New York. Fortu- 

 nately for the cause of liberty, out of these four 

 thousand citizens thus summarily deprived of 

 their freedom and of the sacred right of suf- 

 frage, one man alone, so poor that he had no 

 friends to become his bail, and so friendless 

 that he seems not to have known that he 

 might have walked away, was committed to 

 jail, and allowed to lie there until by accident 



his case was made known in the proper quar- 

 ter, and proceedings of habeas corput were 

 taken to test the question of the legality of 

 these arrests. The name of that unfortunate 

 citizen was Peter Coleman a name destined 

 to live in history with that of John Peter Zen- 

 ger, who, in the colonial days of New York, 

 was so fortunate as to have suffered a similar 

 arrest and to have achieved immortality by 

 vindicating the freedom of the press. Cole- 

 man's case was brought before Judge Blatch- 

 ford, an able and upright Judge of the Federal 

 Court, who never has and never will allow his 

 Republican sympathies to interfere with tlio 

 stern performance of his duty. The case was 

 elaborately argued, and in a careful opinion he 

 decided that not only was the affidavit where- 

 on the arrest was made insufficient, but that 

 the warrant itself was unlawfully issued. He 

 further decided that the naturalization papers 

 which had been called in question upon the 

 other side had been duly made and issued ; 

 and, to quote his own language 



" It therefore appears that Coleman was duly and 

 legally admitted to citizenship, and that the legality 

 ot his admission was not invalidated by any act or 

 omission which occurred either prior or subsequently 

 to his admission. As he was legally admitted, it was 

 proper for the Court to give to him the certificate of 

 citizenship which was given to him, and that certifi- 

 cate was not unlawfully issued or made. On this 

 ground he is entitled to his discharge from arrest. 



"But there is another ground on which Coleman is 

 entitled to be discharged. Even if there were such a 

 defect in the record of the Superior Court as to make 

 the certificate given to him one that was unlawfully 

 issued or made, he was not guilty of an offense under 

 section 5426, unless when he used the certificate he 

 knew that it was unlawfully issued or made. As it 

 appears that he complied fully with all the conditions 

 imposed on him as prerequisites to his admission, and 

 that the unlawfulness, if any, was in the want of form 

 in the records of the Court, and as he received at the 

 time from the Court a certificate stating that all the 

 statutory requisites had been complied with, and that 

 the Court had ordered that he be admitted to be a citi- 

 zen, and that ho was accordingly admitted by the 

 Court to be a citizen, no court would permit a jury to 

 convict him of using such certificate knowing that it 

 was unlawfully issued. So manifest was this that the 

 moment the facts were brought to the attention of this 

 Court on the hearing on the Habeas corpus, it announced 

 that Coleman would be discharged immediately on 

 this ground alone. Thereupon the attorney for the 

 United States stated that he did not think the evi- 

 dence disclosed sufficiently guilty knowledge on the 

 part of Coleman of the defects in the certificate of citi- 

 zenship, and that he consented that he should go at 

 large. He was immediately released from custody, 

 but no formal decision was made, in order that other 

 questions presented might be argued, considered, and 

 decided. 



"An order will be entered discharging Coleman 

 from custody. 



"STEWART L. WOODFORD, Disk Att'y, 



"SAMUEL B. CLARKE, 



Ass't Disk Att'y for the United States. 



"E. ELLERY ANDERSON, 



" GEORGE W. WING ATE, 



For Coleman. 

 " A copy. JOHN I. DAVENPORT, Clerk. 



"Now let me inquire what redress these 

 four thousand citizens thus unlawfully arrested 

 have under the law against Mr. Davenport. 



