all final decrees in the Circuit Court, to the Supreme Court of the United States in the same cases, where the matter in dispute exceeds, exclusive of costs, the sum or value of $2,000, at any time within five years after the decree is rendered, or in case of insanity, coverture, infancy or imprisonment, after such disability shall have ceased.1 The officers of the District Courts are a clerk and marshal appointed for each of the two districts. Commissioners are likewise appointed by the Circuit Courts to take admiralty stipulations, as well as acknowledgments of bail, depositions and affidavits in the Circuit and District Courts, and they have all the powers that a Judge or Justice of the Peace may exercise under the sixth section of the act of 20th July, 1790, for the government and regulation of seamen in the merchant service. During the colonial period, the Court of Admiralty met with the same opposition manifested toward the Court of Chancery. Like the latter, it was instituted by the Crown under the authority of which its judges, registers and marshals were appointed, hence awakening that feeling of independence in the Colonists which seems ever to have possessed them, and which they exhibited whenever they deemed it encroached upon by the kingly power. The undisturbed existence of the Colonial Supreme Court may be traced to the fact that the Colonists claimed the court to have been created by the act of the Assembly of 1691, and not from the subsequent ordinance of Lord Bellamont reviving that act and those emanating from it. The forty-first section of the act of 1763, relative to the suing for penalties and forfeitures in the Vice-Admiralty Court, created great dissatisfaction among the Colonists. The course of the General Assembly probably led to the subsequent act of 1768. On the 18th of October, 1764, the General Assembly addressed a petition respectively to the King, Lords and Commons, in the former of which they say that "the unavoidable delegations of the royal authority which necessarily expose us to the designs of wicked men, leave us neither rest nor security, while a custom house officer may wantonly seize what a judge of your Majesty's Court of Vice-Admiralty may condemn in his discretion, or at best restore to the honest proprietor without a possibility of a restitution for the injury." In the second they declare "that the amazing powers vested by some of the late acts of trade in the Judges of the Vice-Admiralty Courts, who do not proceed according to the course of the common law, nor admit of trials by juries, one of the most essential privileges of Englishmen, has so unfavorable an aspect on the property of the subject, that we could not, consistent with our duty, suppress our apprehensions;" and in the third they say, "we cannot stifle our regret that the laws of trade in general change the current of justice from the common law, and subject controversies of the utmost importance to the decisions of the Vice-Admiralty Courts who proceed not according to the old wholesome laws of the land, nor are always filled with judges of approved knowledge and integrity."" 1 Conkling's United States Admiralty, 2, 372. (Ed. 1857.) On the 11th of December, 1765, the General Assembly again addressed a petition respectively to the King and both Houses of Parliament, in which they complain that the right of trial by jury, till lately uninterruptedly enjoyed, was "infringed by several late acts of Parliament extending the jurisdiction of the Admiralty Courts to causes altogether foreign to their nature and to such as could constitutionally be only tried by a jury, and this in a manner the most inconvenient and grievous imaginable;" and also "by our municipal law, all admiralty jurisdictions have been confined to marine causes. We therefore tremble at the great alterations which have been made in that wholesome system of laws which, as English subjects inheritably, belongs to us, by giving the Courts of Admiralty a jurisdiction in causes arising on penal statutes, and only triable by the courts of common law." The General Assembly once more, on the 31st December, 1768, in another petition to the Lords in Parliament, complain "that by the late extension of the admiralty jurisdiction to penalties, forfeitures and even trespasses upon the land, we lose the unspeakable advantages of the ancient trial by jury, so deservedly celebrated by Englishmen in all ages as essential to their safety."" 1 Journal General Assembly, 2, 772, 775, 779. * Journal General Assembly, 2, 795, 800. * Journal General Assembly, 1769, p. 14. Among the last proceedings of the last General Assembly, which, convening on the 4th of April, 1769, and continued by successive prorogations till the 10th of January, 1775, was dissolved on the third of April following, were petitions respectively to the King, Lords and Commons, emanating from a resolution moved by Colonel Philip Schuyler, on the third March of the last mentioned year. The resolution declared that so far as the act of 4th George III, extended the Admiralty Courts beyond their ancient limits, and deprived the Colonists of a trial by jury it was a grievance. On the 25th of March, 1775, the above petitions were adopted by the Assembly. In the petition to the King they denounced the "extending the Courts of Admiralty beyond their ancient limits, giving them a concurrent jurisdiction in causes heretofore cognizable only in the courts of common law, and by that means depriving the American subject of a trial by jury, as grievous and destructive of our rights and privileges." In the petition to the Lords, they state that "the jurisdiction of the Admiralty Courts has been extended beyond its ancient limits; and the judges of those courts invested with new and unconstitutional powers;" and in that to the Commons they complain of these matters as destructive to freedom and injurious to their property.' 1 Journal General Assembly, 1775, pp. 109-117. L |