“I am satisfied with you that if Orders and Decrees are not repealed, and a continuance of the embargo is preferred to war (which sentiment is universal here), Congress must legalize all means which may be necessary to obtain its end.”[220] If repeated and menacing warnings from the people, the State authorities, and officers of the national government failed to produce an impression on the President’s mind, he was little likely to regard what came from the Judiciary; yet the sharpest of his irritations was caused by a judge whom he had himself, in 1804, placed on the Supreme Bench to counteract Marshall’s influence. Some merchants of Charleston, with consent of the collector and district-attorney, applied for a mandamus to oblige the collector of that town to clear certain ships for Baltimore. The collector admitted that he believed the voyage to be intended in good faith, and that under the Embargo Law he had no right of detention; but he laid Secretary Gallatin’s instructions before the court. The case was submitted without argument, and Justice William Johnson, of the South Carolina circuit,--a native of South Carolina, and a warm friend of the President,--decided that the Act of Congress did not warrant detention, and that without the sanction of law the collector was not justified by instructions from the Executive in increasing the restraints upon commerce. The mandamus issued. These proceedings troubled but did not check the President. “I saw them with great concern,” he wrote to the governor of South Carolina,[221] “because of the quarter from whence they came, and where they could not be ascribed to any political waywardness.” Rodney, the attorney-general, undertook to overrule Justice Johnson’s law, and wrote, under the President’s instructions, an official opinion that the court had no power to issue a mandamus in such a case. This opinion was published in the newspapers at the end of July, “an act unprecedented in the history of executive conduct,” which in a manner forced Justice Johnson into a newspaper controversy. The Judge’s defence of his course was temperate and apparently convincing to himself, although five years afterward he delivered an opinion[222] of the whole Supreme Court in a similar case, “unquestionably inconsistent” with his embargo decision, which he then placed on technical ground. He never regained Jefferson’s confidence; and so effective was the ban that in the following month of December the Georgia grand-jury, in his own circuit, made him the object of a presentment for “improper interference with the Executive.”