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court, before which the trial of the Africans was pending. They supposed it was the Circuit, when in fact it was the District Court.

The Grampus arrived at New Haven three days before the decision of the Judge Judson was pronounced. Her appearance there, in January, when the ordinary navigation of Long Island sound is suspended, coming from the adjoining naval station at Brook-lyn, naturally excited surprise, curiosity, suspicion. What could be the motive of the Secretary of the Navy for ordering a public vessel of the United States upon such a service at such a time? Why should her commander, her officers and crew to be exposed, in the most tempestuous and the coldest month of the year, at once to the snowy hurricanes of the northeast, and the ice-bound shores of the northwest? These were questions necessarily occurring to the minds of every witness to this strange and sudden apparition. lieut. Paine and his officers were questioned why they were there, and whither they were bound? were questioned why they were there, and whither they were bound? They could not tell. The mystery of iniquity sometimes is but a transparent veil and reveals its own secret. The fate of the Amistad captives was about to be decided as far as it could be by the judge of a sub-ordinate tribunal. The surrender of them had been demanded of the Executive by a foreign minister, and earnestly pressed upon the court by the President's officer, the District Attorney. The sudden and unexpected appearance of the Grampus, with a destination unavowed, was a very intelligible signal of the readiness, of the willingness, of the wish of the President to comply with the foreign minister's demand. It was a signal equally intelligible to the political sympathies of a judge presumed to be congenial to those of a northern President with southern principles, and the District Attorney in his letter of  20th December had given soothing hoped to the Secretary of State, which he in turn had communicated in conference, on the 28th of December, to the Spanish minister, that the decree of the judge, dooming the Africans to servitude and death in Cuba, would be as pliant to the vengeful thirst of the barracoon slave-traders, as that the Herod was in olden times to the demand of his dancing daughter for the head of John the Baptist in a charger.

But when lieut. Paine showed to the District Attorney the Executive warrant to the marshal for the delivery of the negroes, he immediately perceived its nullity by the statement that they were in custody under a process from the "Circuit Court and that the same error had been committed in the instructions to the marshal. "in great haste," therefore, he immediately dispatched Liet. Meade, as a special messenger to Washington, requesting a correction of the error in the warrant and instructions; giving notice that if the pretended friends of the negroes obtain a writ of habeas corpus, the marshal could not justify under the warrant as it was; and that the decision of the court would undoubtedly he had be the time the bearer of the message would be able to return to New Haven.

This letter was dated the 11th of January, 1840. the trial had already been five days "progressing." The evidence was all in, and the case was to be submitted to the court on that day. Misgivings were already entertained that the decision of the judge might not be so complacent to the longings of the Executive department as had been foretold and almost promised on the 20th of December. Mr. Holabird, therefore, at the desire of the Marshal propounds that decent question, and requests precise instructions, "weather in the event of a decree by the court requiring the Marshal to release the Negroes, or in case of an appeal by the adverse party, it was expected the Executive warrant [to ship off prisoners in the Grampus to Cuba,] would be executed?" these inquiries may account perhaps for the fact that the same Marshal, after the District and Circuit courts had both decided that these negroes were free, still returned them upon the census of the inhabitants of Connecticut as Slaves.

The secretary of state was more wary. The messenger, Lieut. Meade, bore his dispatch from New Haven to Washington in one day. On the 12th of January, Mr. Forsyth in a confidential letter to Mr. Holabird informs him that his missive of the day before had been received. That the order for the delivery of the Negroes to Lieut. Paine of the Grampus was returned, corrected agreeably to the District Attorney's suggestion-by whom corrected un ununited man can tell. Of the final warrant of Martin Van Buren, President of the united States, to the Marshal of the District of Connecticut, to ship for transportation beyond the seas, an undefined, nameless number of human beings, not a trace rmains upon the records or the files of any one of the Executive Departments, and when nearly three months after this transaction the documents relating to it were, upon a call from the House of