Before the defense was formally opened its course and character had been anticipated by the cross-examination of Mr. Stevens; in this quality of a trial lawyer he was an acknowledged master. The opening speech of Mr. Cuyler referred to the division among the counsel for the prosecution; it praised the fairness of Mr. Ashmead, who, it declared, had been remanded to the background, because Maryland distrusted the justice of Pennsylvania. This was an effective appeal to the State pride of the jury. He vigorously assailed Kline, who had been the Government’s most zealous witness. He traced the course of Pennsylvania’s legislation on slavery and insisted that this Commonwealth was “ever true to her plighted constitutional good faith”; he extolled Hanway’s civic virtues, and dwelt with emphasis upon the local agitation over the “lawless and diabolical outrages” of the kidnappers; and finally ridiculed the idea of treason in the allegation that “three harmless, non-resisting Quakers, and eight-and-thirty wretched, miserable, penniless negroes, armed with corn-cutters, clubs, and a few muskets, and headed by a miller, in a felt hat, without a coat, without arms, and mounted on a sorrel nag, levied war against the United States.” When Mr. Stevens began the production of testimony for the defense with offers to prove the recent kidnapping outrages in the neighborhood of Gap, the legal storm center of the trial was at hand. The prosecution saw and feared the influence of this line of evidence as keenly as the defense recognized its force and value. Judges Grier and Kane both discerned the vital issue at once and long before the argument concluded, pointed out that as the accusation was treason--a position founded upon some previous conspiracy--the defense must be allowed the same latitude to disprove intent as had been allowed to the prosecution to establish it. This opened the way for Thomas Pennington to tell the story of what had occurred at the home of his son-in-law, William Marsh Chamberlain, the preceding January--it was the same night, by the way, that “James Ray fell dead as he entered the door of his own house.” As has been heretofore related, in the absence at Ray’s of the head of the Chamberlain household, the black man in employ was beaten and dragged out and carried off by intruders without legal process and led by local abettors of the capture. The fact that it was not shown the man taken was a free man, or that he may have been reclaimed by the authority of his owner, made little difference in the popular feeling about the affair or in the effectiveness of the incident for trial purposes. If such ruthlessness might be technically legal it made the slave law none the less odious!