craft lines, and the idea that workers should control the nation's industries. Their rhetoric of class conflict, tactics of strikes and sabotage, antiwar stance, and ready acceptance of blacks and immigrants into membership made the Wobblies seem more threatening than their membership number, which probably never exceeded 150,000. Many alien members of the IWW were deported under the immigration acts, and by the end of the war most of the union's leaders, including William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, had been imprisoned under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.29 The IWW aroused such bitter public opposition that when Wobblie leaders were released from Leavenworth on bond pending an appeal of their case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit received a deluge of mail and newspaper editorials objecting to their release.30 Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union, was also imprisoned during the war. The Indiana-born son of immigrant parents, Debs became a socialist while serving a sixmonth prison term for defying an injunction against the Pullman strike in 1894, then ran for President on the Socialist ticket three times, polling over 900,000 votes by 1912. At a Socialist convention in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918, Debs delivered a typically forceful and impassioned speech denouncing war. "The master class," Debs declared, "has always brought a war and the subject class has fought the battle. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, and the subject class has had all to lose and nothing to gain."31 Four days later, he was indicted for violation of the Espionage Act. A jury decided that Debs's speech opposed not just war in general, but the existing war in particular, and that the "natural effect" of this opposition was to obstruct draft recruitment. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. In 1920 Debs again ran for President from the penitentiary at Atlanta and polled nearly a million votes. By this time, public sentiment had changed, and on Christmas Day 1921, President Warren Harding ordered Debs released, though without restoring his citizenship.32 Records of the two federal courts in Illinois suggest sectional differences in prosecuting the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Relatively few indictments were brought in the U.S. district court at Chicago, where persons of German descent numbered second only to the Irish in Chicago's large immigrant population. Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, acutely aware of the ethnic composition of his constituency, was so reluctant to speak out against Germany that he earned the nickname "Kaiser Bill." In downstate Illinois, the federal court at Springfield prosecuted many more espionage and sedition cases. Numerous indictments were against persons with German surnames who had allegedly expressed a variety of antiwar sentiments. The political views that Joseph Balough expressed in a Granite City saloon in April 1918 earned him a federal indictment and two years in Leavenworth Penitentiary. Balough opined that Hungary and Germany were "all right"; he liked Germany and would fight for Germany; he liked the kaiser and he would fight for the kaiser. 33 Charles P. Gibson recalled the rhetoric of Eugene Debs when he called it a "rich man's war," and said "the rich men were getting richer and that the poor people were getting poorer and that our poor boys were going to fight for them and that we should let the rich men subscribe to the Red Cross and pay for their own war." Gibson did not contest the charges against him and was fined $100 and costs, a much more lenient punishment than Debs received. 34 By 1941 the United States was once again in a state of war. Despite the passage of the Smith Act, a new sedition law enacted in 1940, the Midwest's most acclaimed sedition trials were based on the wartime Espionage Act of 1917. One of these involved Elmer Hartzel, a Chicago engineer indicted on charges of issuing Nazi propaganda to the armed forces. Following a conviction by the U.S. district court in Chicago, Hartzel appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which affirmed the lower court's decision.35 When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Hartzel v. U.S. represented the Court's first adjudication of a World War II prosecution based upon the Espionage Act of 1917. In a five to four decision, the Supreme Court overturned Hartzel's conviction, citing insufficient evidence. The dissenting faction of the Court, however, pointed out that the seditious articles were sent directly to high-ranking military officers and military newspapers. What was their purpose, asked the Court's minority, if not to encourage insubordination and disloyalty?36 In 1942 the U.S. district court in Detroit sentenced a civilian to death for treason, the first time an American civil court had done so since the Civil War Copperhead cases. Max Stephan, a German-American tavern-keeper in Detroit, had provided an escaped Nazi prisoner of war with food, shelter, clothing, money, and other amenities, including a prostitute.37 When the Detroit court passed the sentence of death, federal Judge Arthur Tuttle warned: "during this awful war the penalty for treason should be death; and that statement should be spoken loudly enough so that every disloyal citizen of our country contemplating treason will hear it, and distinctly enough so that he will understand it. There should be no trifling with traitors."38 The Supreme Court did not hear the case, and Stephan seemed destined for a hangman's noose on gallows built expressly for him. Hours before the scheduled execution, however, President Franklin Roosevelt commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment, but not before chastising the court for its severe penalty when the law provided varying punishments for "treason of different qualities."39 Stephan's case, like those of Skiff, Milligan, and Debs, illustrates the way opposition to the government has been continually reassessed during the past two hundred years. The federal courts have functioned as the primary interpreters of treason, espionage, sedition, and other translations of disloyalty. Documentation of the courts' interpretations survives in the archival records of the U.S. district courts, U.S. circuit courts, and U.S. courts of appeals preserved in the regional archives of the National Archives and Records Administration. Although published legal reports scrutinize the points of law in precedent-setting disloyalty cases, they often miss the social and political history found in the original court documents-the mixed loyalties of a new immigrant, the perilous capture of a ship laden with contraband, or the anguish of a shackled prisoner standing before a military tribunal. 2U.S. Constitution, Article III, sec. 3. 3Dwight Henderson, Congress, Courts, and Criminals: The Development of Federal Criminal Law, 1801–1829 (1985), PP. 8-9. *Zechariah Chaffee, Jr., Free Speech in the United States (1969), p. 497. Jack W. Peltason, Constitutional Liberty and Seditious Activity (1954), pp. 10–13. Vol. 1, 1850-74, pp. 45-46, Criminal Dockets, 1850– 98, USCC-SO, RG 21, NA-Great Lakes; and Henderson, Congress, Courts, and Criminals, pp. 8–9. 'Nathaniel Weyl, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History (1950), p. 267; and James Willard Hurst, "The Historic Background of the Treason Clause in the Constitution," in The Law of Treason in the United States: Collected Essays (1971), p. 175, n. 46. BU.S. v. Cathcart, Criminal Case 109; U.S. v. Parmenter, Criminal Case 110; U.S. v. Cresap, Criminal Case 111; U.S. v. Fleming, Criminal Case 112; U.S. v. Patton, Criminal Case 113; U.S. v. Hughes, Criminal Case 116; and U.S. v. Hartinger, Criminal Case 125, USCC-SO, RG 21, NA-Great Lakes. "Vol. 1, 1850-74; pp. 69-73, 125, Criminal Dockets, 1850-98, USCC-SO, RG 21, NA-Great Lakes. 10U.S. v. McElwee, Criminal Case 194, USCC-SO, RG 21, NA-Great Lakes. 11U.S. v. McElwee, p. 114, Vol. 1, 1850-74, Criminal Dockets, 1850-98, USCC-SO, RG 21, NA-Great Lakes; and U.S. v. McElwee, Case 4882, p. 5865, Docket K, 1864– 68, Dockets of the Supreme Court of the United States, National Archives Microfilm Publication M216, roll 3, frame 1763, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States, RG 267, NA. 12 Patricia Allan Lucie, Freedom and Federalism: Congress and Courts, 1861-1866 (1986), p. 38. 13 Silver nitrate used in cauterization. 14Indictments, General Law Cases, 1855-1930, U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of Illinois (USCC 20 Lucie, Freedom and Federalism, p. 40. 23 Hale quotes Vallandigham in “Introduction to 'Man Without a Country,' "The Outlook 59 (May 14, 1989): 116. 24 Frank Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (1970), p. 279. 25 Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (1984), p. 227. 26 Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (1924), p. 221. 27 Milligan v. Slack, Mixed Case Files 1472, U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of Indiana, RG 21, NAGreat Lakes. 28 Act of June 15, 1917, Title I, sec. 3, amended May 16, 1918. 29 U.S. v. Haywood, et al., Criminal Case 6125, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, RG 21; and Haywood, et al. v. U.S., Case 2721, U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Records of the U.S. Court of Appeals, RG 276, both in NA-Great Lakes. 30 Rayman L. Solomon, History of the Seventh Circuit, 1891-1941 (1976), pp. 167–168. 31U.S. v. Debs, Criminal Case 4057, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, RG 21, NA-Great Lakes. 32 Ibid. 33 U.S. v. Balough, Criminal Case 15,910, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, RG 21, NAGreat Lakes. 34U.S. v. Gibson, Criminal Case 15,889, USDC-SI, RG 21, NA-Great Lakes. 35 U.S. v. Hartzel, 138 F. 2d 169 (Seventh Circuit 1943). 36 Hartzel v. U.S., 322 U.S. 680. 37 Weyl, Treason, pp. 343–344. 38 U.S. v. Stephan, 50 F. Supp. 739, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, 1943. 39 Weyl, Treason, pp. 345-346. Discovering Frontier History Through Territorial Court Records L By Mark A. Corriston National Archives - Central Plains Region ife on the frontier is revealed from a unique perspective in territorial court records held by the National Archives-Central Plains Region. In territorial court records a real "Wild West" emerges, replete with Indians, cattle rustling, murder, mayhem, adultery, theft, counterfeiting, and all manner of lawlessness. Collectively they offer insight into obscure dimensions of the frontier. During a period of undeveloped civil authority, transportation, and communications, territorial court records provide an invaluable source of information on a variety of historical, political, economic, and social subjects. Today there is a distinct separation of jurisdiction between the state, federal, and local courts, but during the territorial period the territorial courts heard every type of case. These court records, therefore, are a most significant historical resource for studying the history of a region. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 "set the pattern for judicial organization in the territories east of the Mississippi River by providing for courts consisting of three judges who would be appointed by the President." The 1836 Wisconsin Territorial Act standardized the organization of the territorial courts. "This act provided for a supreme court consisting of a chief justice and two associate justices who would hold sessions in the state capital once a year. The territory was organized by the legislature into three districts presided over by one of the three judges. The courts were designated as district courts, a title which was to remain with the trial courts after statehood."2 This basic model of territorial organization was established in the territories of Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota. Prior to the opening of a territory to settlement, some of these regions were under the extended jurisdiction of neighboring district courts. Through constant reorganization, frontier territories were appended to other territories, left unorganized but under the extended jurisdiction of other territories or states, or divided into multiple territories before being formally organized as a territory. Therefore, the earliest judicial records from some territories may be found in the federal court records of other states. This arrangement was established in Iowa and in the Indian Territory (what is now Oklahoma). Prior |