The United States being in a state of peace with most of the belligerent powers by treaty, and with all of them by the laws of nature, murders and robberies committed by our citizens within our territory, or on the high seas, on those with whom we are so at peace, are punishable equally as if committed on our own inhabitants.  If I might venture to reason a little formally, without being charged with running into ’subtleties and aphorisms,’ I would say, that if one citizen has a right to go to war of his own authority, every citizen has the same.  If every citizen has that right, then the nation (which is composed of all its citizens) has a right to go to war, by the authority of its individual citizens.  But this is not true either on the general principles of society, or by our constitution, which gives that power to Congress alone, and not to the citizens individually.  Then the first position was not true; and no citizen has a right to go to war of his own authority, and for what he does without right, he ought to be punished.  Indeed, nothing can be more obviously absurd than to say, that all the citizens may be at war, and yet the nation at peace.

It has been pretended, indeed, that the engagement of a citizen in an enterprise of this nature, was a divestment of the character of citizen, and a transfer of jurisdiction over him to another sovereign.  Our citizens are certainly free to divest themselves of that character by emigration and other acts manifesting their intention, and may then become the subjects of another power, and free to do whatever the subjects of that power may do.  But the laws do not admit that the bare commission of a crime amounts of itself to a divestment of the character of citizen, and withdraws the criminal from their coercion.  They would never prescribe an illegal act among the legal modes by, which a citizen might disfranchise himself; nor render treason, for instance, innocent by giving it the force of a dissolution of the obligation of the criminal to his country.  Accordingly, in the case of Henfeild, a citizen of these States, charged with having engaged in the port of Charleston, in an enterprise against nations at peace with us, and with having joined in the actual commission of hostilities, the Attorney General of the United States, in an official opinion, declared, that the act with which he was charged was punishable by law.  The same thing has been unanimously declared by two of the Circuit Courts of the United States, as you will see in the charges of Chief Justice Jay, delivered at Richmond, and Judge Wilson, delivered at Philadelphia, both of which are herewith sent.  Yet Mr. Genet, in the moment he lands at Charleston, is able to tell the Governor, and continues to affirm in his correspondence here, that no law of the United States authorizes their government to restrain either its own citizens or the foreigners inhabiting its territory, from warring against the enemies of France.  It is true, indeed,