The National Intelligencer And Washington Advertiser

WASHINGTON CITY.

MONDAY, AUGUST 4.

Messrs. Smith and Ogden are acquitted of the charges preferred against them. A jury of their country has found them not guilty. The grounds on which this acquittal has taken place have not yet been laid before the public. The American Citizen has commenced an account of the trial; but the progress made in the publication is as yet too inconsiderable to throw much light on the subject. From this quarter, as well as another, we are promised a full and faithful report. Under these circumstances, it might have been expected that a spirit of animadversion would have been repressed until the only materials from which the public can form an enlightened judgment had been laid before them. It might have been expected that the triumph on the part of Col. Smith and Mr. Ogden, and their friends, would have been sufficiently great, without sullying it with the indulgence of any unworthy sentiments of resentment or party acrimony. But, however this magnanimous and temperate deportment might have been expected, we are sorry to say that it has not been realised. Party spirit, as if indignant at the fetters for a short time imposed upon it, has rushed forth from its confinement with an infatuated fury, with the malignant purpose of inveighing against the fairest characters in the country. Exultingly it cries, Smith and Ogden are safe! We may now, without a fear of consequences, aim our deadliest shafts at the President and Secretary of State, and the whole republican administration! For, if Smith and Ogden are innocent of the offences with which they were charged, the President and Secretary must be guilty!

This is the miserable logic which these political sophists are found palming on the people! To shew that we state their denunciations fairly, we offer to our readers the following extracts from the New-York Evening Post.

THE MIRANDA TRIAL.

"This trial, whose importance, in both a moral and political point of view, will bring it hereafter more at full length before our readers, will now be touched on slightly. Various considerations, however unite to compel us to present, at this early period, some general views, which seem more particularly to be rendered necessary for the purpose of preventing artful and interested men from giving an erroneous direction to the public mind. After the report, which is in the press, shall have come forth, we shall then resume the subject.

In some remarks which we offered on "Ogden's memorial," in June, last, we declared ourselves satisfied to abide the verdict of the jury which was to pass between the accused and their country, and admitted that as "their defence would rest entirely on proving that they were encouraged by the government, the verdict must be conclusive on the point. If convicted, it must be believed that the administration were entirely innocent of knowledge of the affair; if acquitted, then must the whole guilt rest on them."

The cause has now been tried, solemnly tried, and after a full, fair and impartial hearing of the whole case, the verdicts of two intelligent and independent juries have pronounced that the defendants are not Guilty. It may not be improper here to remind the reader that these prosecutions have been instituted against two of their fellow citizens by the immediate direction of the President of the United States; and that while the issues were pending, and the accused, by the humane construction of our laws, entitled of right to be considered innocent, and to have their cases come before the jury under that favorable impression, the President availed himself of his prerogative, and actually punished one of them (Col. Smith) by depriving him of his office & his family of support; thus prejudging the case, and thus presenting him before the jury, not as a presumptively innocent man, whose guilt was to be established by the accuser, but as a presumptively guilty man who was to take on himself the burden of proving himself innocent. A proceeding unparalleled in the legal annals of this country.

An upright jury however, has stepped in between the oppressed and the oppressor.

We rejoice at this decision, because it is just, and proves that our citizens are too wise and virtuous after all, to destroy each other for party considerations, or for the purposes of promoting an insecure, treacherous and cowardly policy in the government. All the friends of humanity will rejoice at the effect which this verdict must produce in favor of our citizens who have been captured by the Spaniards. If a hasty decision has not already determined their fate, the development of the fact, now no longer doubted by any one, that the expedition under gen. Miranda, was instituted with the knowledge of the American government, must arrest every rigorous proceeding by transferring the responsibility for what has been done, from individuals who were the actors, to the administration which connived at and was originally the cause of their conduct.

It has been suggested, that these proceedings against Col. Smith and Mr. Ogden were necessary political compliances with the wishes of the ministers of France and Spain. We spurn the idea of averting public danger by the sacrifice of our fellow citizens. If injustice has been done to Spain, let us trace the injustice to its source. It will be more safe and honorable to our country, and the separation will be more satisfactory to Spain, if we degrade and punish the Deceiver, than by treacherously betraying the deceived.

But while we fix our attention on this interesting question, let us be just: let Mr. Jefferson have a fair trial—a fairer than it was intended the accused Smith and Ogden should have—let him produce every species of evidence legal and even informal in his favor. Let him be permitted to mitigate and extenuate what he may not be able fully to justify; but let him know that the voices of all honest men unite to concur in demanding an explicit answer to the questions—Whether he was not fully informed that Gen. Miranda came to this country for the express purpose of fitting out the expedition which has sailed for Carraccas?—Whether it was not known to him that Col. Smith was employed in those identical transactions, for which he has been first punished by taking away from him a lucrative office, equal in its operation to a fine of six thousand dollars a year for life, next prosecuted as a criminal at the bar of a court of justice? and lastly whether this same prosecution was not set on foot by his express and personal direction?

This affair cannot be smothered;—public sympathy for the victims at Derne is not yet extinguished—but every nerve in our country will be agonised if the lives of the prisoners at Carraccas are sacrificed to conceal a personal error, or as the price of personal popularity—More of this hereafter—It will be to be seen if any administration can stand such conduct."

But on what are these vehement denunciations founded. No new facts are adduced to prove the participation of the administration in the schemes of Miranda. We do not know what disclosures may be made when a full account of the trial shall be published. But at present the only thing relied upon is the acquittal of Messrs. Smith and Ogden. The utmost this can prove is their innocence, and this in the strict and legal sense of the term. The jury were bound to be governed by legal evidence, and by that only; and it would seem, from their verdict that the evidence of that nature was not sufficiently strong to support the prosecution. But does it follow that because Smith and Ogden are thus found not guilty by a jury of their country of the charges set forth against them, that the President or the Secretary of State are reprehensible? Their acquittal of any participation in Miranda's equipment surely does not convict the administration of a participation in it. Both may be innocent.

The only ground then for censure left is the institution of a prosecution, and the removal of Col. Smith from office. But let any man read the depositions in our first page, in which Ogden and Smith acknowledge the agency they both had in supplying Miranda with military stores and enlisting men, and answer whether, possessed of this information, the executive could hesitate for a moment to order prosecutions, or to remove from office a man, who thus appears, on his own acknowledgement to have had this agency, & consequently to have assisted in infringing laws of which he was constituted the legal guardian? Under this view of the subject it is altogether immaterial whether the depositions of Smith and Ogden were voluntary or extorted. However they may have been obtained, the facts they contain cannot be considered on that account the less true. What are these facts? That Ogden obtained for Miranda and caused to be taken on board of the Leander warlike stores to a great amount; that he aided him in enlisting men; that from conversation with Miranda he "understood the Leander was to land her cargo and general Miranda near the town of Carraccas, in the province of Carraccas, so that the same might be conveyed to that place," and that he also understood "that his object was to relieve the people from oppression." With regard to Smith, he states that Miranda informed him "that he had been invited by his friends at Carraccas his native country, to return to his native place"—that Miranda had invited him to accompany him there; that for the purpose of procuring a fit vessel he referred him to capt. Lewis, who referred him to Mr. Ogden; that he agreed that his son should accompany Miranda ;—"that gen. Miranda represented to him the distressed and oppressed situation of the people of that country to which he was bound, and that the people were generally desirous that a change should take place as to their political situation, and that the said gen. Miranda had that object very near his heart, and it was his wish and intention to effect it if it could be done—and the said gen. Miranda had represented to him that on his arrival there he should be in the bosom of his friends, whom he expected would join him in endeavoring to heave off the yoke of the present Spanish government from the people of that country—and he understood from gen. Miranda, that he was to proceed to extremities to separate that country from the Spanish government if he found the people favorable to such an event"" That he, at the request of gen. Miranda, asked and engaged about 15 or 20 men himself to accompany him."

These are the acknowledgements of these men of the share they had in the enterprize of Miranda. Was not this participation, thus declared, a sufficient reason for the executive to order prosecutions to be commenced? Would they not have been considered as criminally negligent, had they not directed such prosecutions so be instituted? Would not such remissness have justly exposed them to the imputation of being themselves concerned in the expedition? Would not this imputation have gathered strength from permitting col. Smith to remain in office after such an infraction of laws whose enforcement it was his peculiar duty to have attended to. Still further. would not a participation of the Executive have been further corroborated by the suffering these acts to pass unnoticed and by the permitting Col. Smith to continue in office, after his own deposition had declared his belief that the expedition was countenanced by the government? Surely, under such circumstances, forbearance would have been construed into conscious guilt. It would have been said, and justly too, that the administration was afraid to prosecute these men, least their own criminality should be made apparent.

Whence, then, it may be asked, the vehement denunciation of the federal prints? It can only be traced to the malignant spirit of party, that seizes every occasion to traduce that virtue which it dreads as the most formidable obstacle to its personal and ambitious views.