Rumbold's Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson's Last Words on Democracy, 1826

s ThROSECUTIONS for treason were generally virulent, observed Benjamin Franklin to the Constitutional Convention X. on August 20, 1787, perjury too easily made use of against innocence. There was no disagreement with Franklin's comment among the other delegates who had assembled at Philadelphia during that hot summer of I787 to write a new Constitution for the United States. These men all felt with Franklin that treason must be defined precisely in the Constitution, if political liberty were to be preserved in the new nation they had helped to create; they agreed with Franklin that individuals charged with treason must be protected with iron-clad-judicial procedures, if innocence were to be saved from the virulence that inevitably attends treason trials, which, by their very nature, tend to become political prosecutions. Therefore, the Convention on August 20, with a unanimity that was not always apparent in their proceedings, insisted that the Committee of Detail rewrite the treason clause in the Constitution into the form in which we know it today, carefully defining the meaning of treason against the United States and requiring that no one charged with the crime could be convicted, except on the evidence of two witnesses to the same overt treasonable act.' James Madison was to explain the concern of the Convention to provide in this way a copper-riveted definition of the crime, on grounds which echoed Franklin's fears, expressed on the Convention floor, that treason trials would become political trials. New fangled and artificial treasons, Madison wrote in Federalist 43, have been the great engines by which

Democracy · Political science · Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms

• Introduction

  Allen Feldman•South Atlantic Quarterly•2026

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• Political Science and History

  Open Access•Ian Mclean, Iain Mclean•Political Studies•2010

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• Radicals, Rights, and Revolution

  Open Access•Richard L Greaves•Church History•1992

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