Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; Morgenthau, Henry, 1856-1946; United States -- Foreign relations -- 20th century
By this comparison the Sulzer impeachment was a travesty, the defendant
a petty misdemeanant, and the purpose of the trial a spiteful vengeance
on a rebellious henchman. The setting of the Court, however, gave the
event a fictitious dignity. The Senate Chamber at Albany had been
altered for the occasion by the state architect. A lofty seat had been
provided for the presiding judge of the High Court of Impeachment,
Judge Edgar M. Cullen, who, as chief judge of the Court of Appeals,
presided _ex officio_. Below him was a long seat for the associate
judges. Ascending tiers of seats were provided for the forty-four
members of the State Senate who, with the judges of the Court of
Appeals, constituted the High Court of Impeachment. Behind Judge
Cullen’s chair the entire wall of the room was hung with a dark red
velvet curtain in the centre of which was emblazoned the coat of arms of
New York in gold embroidery, flanked on either side by national emblems.
At one side of the court room, places were provided for the “Fourth
Estate,” the gentlemen of the press, to whom Burke had made so eloquent
an appeal on the greater historical occasion. The public balcony, which
at the Hastings trial had been crowded with the Sarah Siddonses and the
_haut ton_ of London, was, here at Albany, crowded with the vengeful
Knickerbocker aristocracy, who had come to gloat in triumph over the
final discomfiture of the demagogic desecrator of the executive mansion.
The Edmund Burke of the Sulzer impeachment was Edgar T. Brackett, late
of the New York Senate. Alton B. Parker and John B. Stanchfield were the
chief counsel of the managers for the Assembly which had presented the
indictment, but Brackett was the man who made the oratorical
impeachment. Sulzer stood upon the prerogative of early precedents and
refused to make a personal appearance before the Court. In compliance
with a judicial ruling he abstained from functioning as Governor while
the trial was in progress and, instead of facing his accusers, spent his
time in a frantic but futile effort to make political combinations that
would save him.
Witness after witness testified to Sulzer’s solicitation of
contributions for which he had made no accounting. My testimony was only
confirmatory of a mass of evidence elicited from men of eminence like
Jacob H. Schiff and many others. I appeared before the Court on
September 24, 1913. Replying to questions from the prosecutor, I
repeated the conversation I had had with Sulzer when I gave him my check
for $1,000, and I also testified to the fact that on the day I returned
from Europe, Governor Sulzer had telephoned me, “If you are going to
testify I hope you will be easy with me”--to which I answered that I
would testify to the facts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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