United States, acting through the War Department and the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau.  The agents to carry out this military jurisdiction are to be selected either from the Army or from civil life; the country is to be divided into districts and subdistricts, and the number of salaried agents to be employed may be equal to the number of counties or parishes in all the United States where freedmen and refugees are to be found.

The subjects over which this military jurisdiction is to extend in every part of the United States include protection to “all employees, agents, and officers of this bureau in the exercise of the duties imposed” upon them by the bill.  In eleven States it is further to extend over all cases affecting freedmen and refugees discriminated against “by local law, custom, or prejudice.”  In those eleven States the bill subjects any white person who may be charged with depriving a freedman of “any civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons” to imprisonment or fine, or both, without, however, defining the “civil rights and immunities” which are thus to be secured to the freedmen by military law.  This military jurisdiction also extends to all questions that may arise respecting contracts.  The agent who is thus to exercise the office of a military judge may be a stranger, entirely ignorant of the laws of the place, and exposed to the errors of judgment to which all men are liable.  The exercise of power over which there is no legal supervision by so vast a number of agents as is contemplated by the bill must, by the very nature of man, be attended by acts of caprice, injustice, and passion.

The trials having their origin under this bill are to take place without the intervention of a jury and without any fixed rules of law or evidence.  The rules on which offenses are to be “heard and determined” by the numerous agents are such rules and regulations as the President, through the War Department, shall prescribe.  No previous presentment is required nor any indictment charging the commission of a crime against the laws; but the trial must proceed on charges and specifications.  The punishment will be, not what the law declares, but such as a court-martial may think proper; and from these arbitrary tribunals there lies no appeal, no writ of error to any of the courts in which the Constitution of the United States vests exclusively the judicial power of the country.

While the territory and the classes of actions and offenses that are made subject to this measure are so extensive, the bill itself, should it become a law, will have no limitation in point of time, but will form a part of the permanent legislation of the country.  I can not reconcile a system of military jurisdiction of this kind with the words of the Constitution which declare that “no person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except