According to Mr. Webster, then, Congress was under no obligation, and had no power, to make a law providing for trial by jury, _except in criminal prosecutions_, until _after_ the seventh article of amendment had been ratified; for if they had any such power, or were under any such obligation, it must be by virtue of some clause or sentence in the constitution, _having a “bearing upon the subject.”_ Now, the first session of Congress commenced March 4th, 1789, but this seventh article of amendment was not ratified, and did not become a part of the constitution, according to Hickey, (Hickey’s Const. p. 36,) until December 15, 1791. Until this time, therefore, according to Mr. Webster, the constitution had secured no right to a trial by jury, except in the case of _criminal prosecutions_; because, until this time, there was no clause or sentence in it “having the least bearing on the subject” of jury trials in any but criminal cases. Yet, on the 24th of September, 1789, _and more than two years previous to the adoption of the seventh amendment_, (by which alone, according to Mr. Webster, they had any power to act in the premises,) Congress did pass the judiciary act; by the ninth, twelfth, and thirteenth sections of which it is provided, that the trial of issues in fact, in the district courts, in the circuit courts, and in the supreme court, shall, with certain exceptions, be by jury. The act also empowers the courts to grant new trials “for reasons for which new trials have usually been granted in the courts of law.” In what courts of law? Did it not mean the courts in Westminster Hall, and those in this country formed after that ancestral model? And does not this show beyond question or cavil, that the principle of the jury trial, _in civil cases_, was incorporated into the constitution of the United States, originally; and that it was universally understood to be so by its framers, and by their contemporaries, the members of the first Congress? From the constitution alone, then, and not from any power above it, or outside of it, did Congress derive its power, on the 24th of September, 1789, and more than two years before the seventh amendment was adopted, to pass the judiciary act, and to fill it full of the fact and the doctrine of jury trials in civil cases. And if Congress, at that time, had legislated on the subject of fugitive slaves, would it not have had the same power to provide the trial by jury, to determine the question, slave or free, as it had to provide for this mode of trial in other cases?