The great men who submitted this seventh amendment to the states, treated the trial by jury, in civil cases, as a then subsisting constitutional right. They passed a law to put the practical enjoyment of this right into the hands of the people, well knowing that there is scarcely a right which we hold under the constitution which we can beneficially possess or use, without the intervention of some law, as its channel or medium. Suppose this seventh amendment had never been adopted, on what ground would the trial by jury, in civil cases, have rested up to the present day? Could it have been taken from us all, in all cases except criminal ones, by any corrupt Congress? In asserting, therefore, that, besides the references he has made, there is not another “clause or sentence in the constitution, _having the least bearing on the subject_” of jury trials, Mr. Webster is contradicted by the members of the general convention, by the state conventions, by the senators and representatives, who passed the judiciary act, by President Washington who signed it, and by all the judges who administered that act until the seventh amendment was adopted. II. _Where it is the duty of Congress to provide for trial by jury._ But another of Mr. Webster’s assertions is still more extraordinary. He says “nothing is more false than that such jury trial, [a trial by jury for an alleged slave, or for a freeman claimed as a slave,] is demanded by the constitution, either in its letter or in its spirit.” I make a preliminary remark upon the grossness of the error embodied in the form of this proposition. “_Nothing is more false_;” that is, if I, or any one, had affirmed that our constitution forbids trial by jury, in all cases, under penalty of death; or that it creates an hereditary despotism; or that it establishes the Catholic religion, with the accompaniment of an inquisition for each state; or that it does all these things together; it would not be more “_false_” to the “_spirit_” of the constitution, than to say that it demands the trial by jury, when a man who is seized as a slave, but who asserts that he is free, invokes its protection. But this pertains to the _form_ only of his assertion, and is immaterial to the argument. I proceed to inquire whether its substance be not as indefensible as its form. In another part of Mr. Webster’s letter, he says, that he sees “no objection to the provisions of the law” of 1793. Of course; for he sees no objection to Mr. Butler’s bill, and its amendments; but prefers them to Mr. Seward’s. And he now says, there is nothing in the letter or in the “spirit” of the constitution, which demands the jury trial for an alleged slave, or for a freeman captured and about to be carried away as a slave. Feeble and humble as I am, great and formidable as he is, I join issue with him on this momentous question, and put myself upon the country.