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an Executive communication to the Senate, on the very day on which the hearing commenced in this honorable Court. 

I do not allude to these improprieties from any apprehension of their influence here, but because I feel it to be a duty thus publicly to reprobate a course of proceeding, the obvious tendency of which is to excite jealousy and distrust, and thereby to impair the just confidence with which an unprejudiced community have ever regarded the judgments of this high tribunal. 

This case is not only one of deep interest in itself, as affecting the destiny of the unfortunate Africans whom I represent, but it involves considerations deeply affecting our national character in the eyes of the whole civilized world, as well as questions of power on the part of the government of the United States, which are regarded with anxiety and alarm by a large portion of our citizens. It presents, for the first time, the question whether that government, which was established for the promotion of JUSTICE, which was founded on the great principles of the Revolution, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, can, consistently with the genius of our institutions, become a party to proceedings for the enslavement of human beings cast upon our shores, and found in the condition of freemen within the territorial limits of a FREE AND SOVEREIGN STATE? 

In the remarks I shall have occasion to make, it will be my design to appeal to no sectional prejudices, and to assume no positions in which I shall not hope to be sustained by intelligent minds from the South as well as from the North. Although I am in favor of the broadest liberty of inquiry and discussion, ——happily secured by our Constitution to every citizen, subject only to his individual responsibility to the laws for its abuse, ——I have ever been of the opinion that the exercise of that liberty by citizens of one State in regard to the institutions of another should always be guided by discretion, and tempered with kindness. 

The facts on which the counsel for the appellees move to dismiss this appeal as they appear on the record, or are averred in their motion and not denied, are these:——

The schooner Amistad, on the 26th of August, 1839, arrived in Long Island Sound, in the possession of the appellees, and was anchored about half a mile from the northerly shore of Long Island, near Culloden Point. 

She had sailed from Havana on the 28th of June, bound to Guanaja, under the command of her then owner, Raymon Ferrer, having on board, as passengers, two Spaniards, Josè Ruiz and Pedro Montez, and fifty-four "native Africans," admitted to have been "recently imported