Among the "_midnight appointments_" by President Adams, (a stigma attached to them at the time, and from which they have never been rescued,) were forty-two magistrates, nominated for the District of Columbia. The list, though containing many highly respectable names, was in the main made up of opponents of the President elect, not a few of them strongly imbued with the partisan _furor_ of the day. They were to hold their offices for a period extending beyond that for which the President himself was elected, and it was upon their coöperation Mr. Adams and his cabinet intended that his successor should be mainly dependent for the discharge of the high duty imposed upon him by the Constitution--that of causing the laws to be executed in the Federal District. The nominations were sent to the Senate on the second of March, confirmed during the night of the third, and Mr. Jefferson entered upon the duties of his office the next morning. The commissions were found on the table in the State Department with its seal attached, signed by President Adams, and if signed also by a Secretary it must have been by a _locum tenens_, as Mr. Marshall had some days before been transferred from the office of Secretary of State to that of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The commissions had not been delivered,--an act which Mr. Jefferson, as the head of the executive department of the Government, decided to be necessary to the completion of the appointment. Under such circumstances, and, doubtless, stung by the ungraciousness of the treatment he had received, he directed that the commissions should neither be recorded nor delivered, but treated as nullities. Believing the number far too large, he issued new commissions during the recess to twenty of those selected by Mr. Adams and to five others designated by himself, nominated them to the Senate at its next session, by which body they were confirmed. This transaction furnished the desired occasion to apply the opening wedge for the enlargement of the judicial power of the Federal Government, and it was promptly and fully embraced through the proceedings that were had in the celebrated case of Marbury and Madison. The judges of the Supreme Court were to a man Federalists, and at the head of them stood, as chief justice, President Jefferson's persevering and consistent old political antagonist--John Marshall.