I wish to say a word here, gentlemen, preliminarily, on another subject, and that is, what the duty and right of counsel is on a trial of this kind. I hold the doctrine that counsel, when he appears in Court to defend the life of one man, much less the lives of twelve men, is the _alter ego_ of his clients--that he has no trammels on his lips, and that his conscience, and his duty to God, and to his profession, must direct him in his best efforts to save the lives of his clients,--and that it becomes his duty; regardless of all other considerations, except adherence to truth and the laws of rectitude, to present every argument for his clients which influenced their minds when they embarked in the enterprise for which they are placed before the Jury on trial for their lives. It is not the fault of counsel, in a case of this kind, if he is obliged to call the attention of the Jury to the past history of his own country, to the cotemporaneous expositions of its Constitution, to the decisions of its Courts of Judicature, and of the highest Court of the Union, which have laid down doctrines with reference to the Constitution of the Government, which are accepted at the present day, entirely incompatible with the success of this prosecution. In doing so, you will certainly perceive that, however much these men on trial for their lives may have been deceived and deluded, as I sincerely think they have been to a very great extent, and, as was frankly admitted by the learned counsel who opened the case for the prosecution, that at least, there was the strongest excuse for that deception and delusion among those of them who had read the Constitution of their Government, who had read its Declaration of Independence, who had read the cotemporaneous exposition of its Constitution, put forward by the wisest of the men who framed it, and on the honeyed accents of whose lips the plain citizens of the States reposed when they adopted the Constitution. If it had been their good fortune to be familiar with the decisions of its Courts, they had learned what the Supreme Court had said with reference to the sovereign rights of the States, and with reference to the strict limit and measure of power which they had conceded to the General Government, and there was, at least, a very strong excuse for their following those doctrines, however unpopular they may have become in a later day of the Republic.