Notes on a Newspaper Article, 16 February 1801
Notes on a Newspaper Article
Feb. 16. see the Wilmington Mirror of Feb. 14. mr Bayard’s elaborate argument to prove that the common law, as1 modified by the laws of the respective2 states at the epoch of the ratificn of the constn, attached to the courts of the US.
MS (DLC: TJ Papers, 108:18534); entirely in TJ’s hand; on same sheet as Notes on a Conversation with Gen. John Armstrong, 14 Feb.
Wilmington Mirror: Mirror of the Times, & General Advertiser, a semiweekly Republican newspaper established in Delaware in November 1799, with James J. Wilson serving as writer and printer. The newspaper printed James A. Bayard’s arguments in defense of the common law delivered on 22 Jan. during the debate in the House of Representatives on renewal of the Sedition Act. The account in the Mirror varied slightly from that printed in the Annals of Congress (Wilmington Mirror of the Times, 14 Feb. 1801; , 10:946–50; , 320–2; , 1:84). For Bayard’s previous remarks on the subject, see Vol. 31:357n.
1. TJ here canceled “existing.”
2. Word interlined in place of “several.”