The First American Impeachments

Abstract

T S HE study of impeachment in America properly begins in the seventeenth-century colonies. The impeachments of Governor John Harvey of Virginia (i635), of John Morecroft, Thomas Trueman, Charles James, and Jacob Young in Maryland (i669-i683), and Pennsylvania Chief Justice Nicholas More (i685) were serious attempts by American colonists to adapt the English law of impeachment to conditions in the New World. These cases constitute a neglected episode in our constitutional history. 1 Precedent for impeachment in the House of Commons, with trial in the Lords, originated in the fourteenth-century parliaments. Parliament functioned as a court, and its impeachment power fell within this function. The Commons impeached for treason, trespasses, and other crimes. These were criminal offensesillegal acts -in violation of statute, common law, or rulings of the king's courts of commission. The House of Lords, to this day a trial court, sat as a body to hear the Commons prosecute, then judged the accused. A criminal penalty was always attached to conviction. Anyone could be indicted in this way; it was the enormity and public danger of the offense, not the official position of the offender, that led to the impeachment. At the same time, impeachment always had political circumstances and consequences. The charge of treason, the most serious criminal offense for which impeachment was brought, could be politically motivated. Any demonstrable breach of public faith could be constructed into a violation of the treason statute of 25 Edward III. Whatever its leaders' motives, when the Commons impeached, it struck as the people of England to save the common interest. The Commons' power to harass and occasionally punish highly placed opponents was manifest in treason cases, the bulk of early impeachments, as well as in trespasses (later high crimes and misde-