A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 359 pages of information about A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents.

A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 359 pages of information about A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents.

Out of this condition of things arose a question which at successive periods of our public annals has occupied the attention of the best minds in the Union.  This question is, What waters are public navigable waters, so as not to be of State character and jurisdiction, but of Federal jurisdiction and character, in the intent of the Constitution and of Congress?  A proximate, but imperfect, answer to this important question is furnished by the acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States defining the constitutional limits of the maritime jurisdiction of the General Government.  That jurisdiction is entirely independent of the revenue power.  It is not derived from that, nor is it measured thereby.

In that act of Congress which, in the first year of the Government, organized our judicial system, and which, whether we look to the subject, the comprehensive wisdom with which it was treated, or the deference with which its provisions have come to be regarded, is only second to the Constitution itself, there is a section in which the statesmen who framed the Constitution have placed on record their construction of it in this matter.  It enacts that the district courts of the United States “shall have exclusive cognizance of all civil cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, including all seizures under the law of impost, navigation, or trade of the United States, when the seizures are made on waters which are navigable from the sea by vessels of 10 or more tons burden, within their respective districts, as well as upon the high seas.”  In this cotemporaneous exposition of the Constitution there is no trace or suggestion that nationality of jurisdiction is limited to the sea, or even to tide waters.  The law is marked by a sagacious apprehension of the fact that the Great Lakes and the Mississippi were navigable waters of the United States even then, before the acquisition of Louisiana had made wholly our own the territorial greatness of the West.  It repudiates unequivocally the rule of the common law, according to which the question of whether a water is public navigable water or not depends on whether it is salt or not, and therefore, in a river, confines that quality to tide water—­a rule resulting from the geographical condition of England and applicable to an island, with small and narrow streams, the only navigable portion of which, for ships, is in immediate contact with the ocean, but wholly inapplicable to the great inland fresh-water seas of America and its mighty rivers, with secondary branches exceeding in magnitude the largest rivers of Great Britain.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.