Harpers+12

Harper's Weekly, May 27, 1865, page 323 (Editorial)
 * JEFFERSON DAVIS **

Treason is the highest crime known to the Constitution. The treason of Jefferson Davis and his confederates has been prolonged and bloody beyond precedent. The Government of the United States owed it to itself to spare no effort to arrest the acknowledged chief of the conspiracy. It has secured him, and no sound reason can be urged why the law should not take its course. Jefferson Davis must be tried for treason. If convicted he must be sentenced. If sentenced he must be executed, unless for high reasons of state the President should commute his punishment.

The sole question will be, how Davis’s fate can be made the most emphatic warning. Would it be wiser to disable him forever as an American citizen; to banish him from the country under penalty of death upon his return, and so deprive him of the opportunity of making that final appeal from the scaffold as a political victim, which always awakens sooner or later the sympathy of mankind; or to show the country and the world that a Senator of the United States, who deliberately resigns his office at the capital and withdraws to wage cruel and causeless war against the Government, however imposing his rebellion may be, however its scope and duration may convulse his country to the heart and command the attention of the world and the sympathy of an aristocracy every where, is still a criminal; and when arrested by the law will be brought to trial, and upon lawful conviction will be made to suffer the penalty, exactly like the obscurest thief, and will not be shielded from punishment on the ground that his crime has involved the desolation of the country, the slaughter of thousands of innocent citizens, and the national embarrassment of a colossal debt? Can any lesson be so permanently impressive as the final proof by the solemn sanction of the supreme authority that treason against the United States is not a political difference of opinion, but a crime whose enormity will not remit the legal penalty?

It is clear that, if Davis shall be lawfully convicted, the question must be finally settled whether treason shall ever be punished in this country as a capital crime. If in his person the penalty is remitted it can never be enforced upon any other offender. Treason so towering, so sanguinary, so causeless can never again be committed. If magnanimity or good policy require that Davis shall not suffer, they require that treason shall cease to be accounted a capital crime.


 * 1. Does the author seem to favor death or banishment as a punishment for Davis? **
 * 2. What, does he say, are the positive and negative consequences of each? **
 * 3. What is a capital crime? **