Neither the process nor authority of these tribunals thus constituted can be respected consistently with the supremacy of the laws or the rights and security of the citizen.  If they be submitted to, the protection due from the Government to its officers and citizens is withheld, and there is at once an end not only to the laws, but to the Union itself.

Against such a force as the sheriff may, and which by the replevin law of South Carolina it is his duty to exercise, it can not be expected that a collector can retain his custody with the aid of the inspectors.  In such case, it is true, it would be competent to institute suits in the United States courts against those engaged in the unlawful proceeding, or the property might be seized for a violation of the revenue laws, and, being libeled in the proper courts, an order might be made for its redelivery, which would be committed to the marshal for execution.  But in that case the fourth section of the act, in broad and unqualified terms, makes it the duty of the sheriff “to prevent such recapture or seizure, or to redeliver the goods, as the case may be,” “even under any process, order, or decrees, or other pretext contrary to the true intent and meaning of the ordinance aforesaid.”  It is thus made the duty of the sheriff to oppose the process of the courts of the United States, and for that purpose, if need be, to employ the whole power of the county.  And the act expressly reserves to him all power which, independently of its provisions, he could have used.  In this reservation it obviously contemplates a resort to other means than those particularly mentioned.

It is not to be disguised that the power which it is thus enjoined upon the sheriff to employ is nothing less than the posse comitatus in all the rigor of the ancient common law.  This power, though it may be used against unlawful resistance to judicial process, is in its character forcible, and analogous to that conferred upon the marshals by the act of 1795.  It is, in fact, the embodying of the whole mass of the population, under the command of a single individual, to accomplish by their forcible aid what could not be effected peaceably and by the ordinary means.  It may properly be said to be a relic of those ages in which the laws could be defended rather by physical than moral force, and in its origin was conferred upon the sheriffs of England to enable them to defend their county against any of the King’s enemies when they came into the land, as well as for the purpose of executing process.  In early and less civilized times it was intended to include “the aid and attendance of all knights and others who were bound to have harness.”  It includes the right of going with arms and military equipment, and embraces larger classes and greater masses of population than can be compelled by the laws of most of the States to perform militia duty.  If the principles of the common law are recognized in South Carolina (and