In his Critical and Historical Essays Lord Macaulay has left to posterity a vivid account of the opening of the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, late Governor-General of India, before the House of Lords, for high crimes and misdemeanors allegedly committed during his incumbency.

The event took place on February 13, 1788. The scene was Westminster Hall, London, where thirty kings had been crowned and where Charles I faced his accusers. Macaulay tells us that the avenues were lined with grenadiers and kept clear by cavalry, for a great throng had assembled to view the spectacle.

Some 170 Lords, robed in gold and ermine, and marshaled by heralds under Garter King-at-Arms, marched in solemn order from their House to the tribunal. In the procession also were the judges in their vestments of state. Bringing up the rear were the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, the brothers and sons of King George III, and, last of all, the Prince of Wales, “conspicuous for his fine person and noble bearing.”

The gray walls of the ancient building, says Macaulay, were hung with scarlet. Benches draped in red were provided for the Peers, and benches draped in green for the Commons. Seated in the galleries were the Queen, surrounded by the “fair-haired daughters of Brunswick,” the ambassadors and ministers of great countries, and such distinguished personages as Mrs. Siddons, the actress and beauty, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the artist, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, and other women of brilliance and fashion.

There, too, were the Managers, the great orators of the day—Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Windham, and Charles Earl Grey. They were to conduct the prosecution.

There, too, in all his injured dignity was the man who was responsible for this glamorous exhibition of justice. Nearly eight years were to pass before the tedious performance came to a close and Warren Hastings went forth a free and vindicated man.

Meanwhile the world looked on at the drama. Not the least interested spectators were members of the bench and bar of the new nation across the sea. It had lately won its independence, but none the less, especially where the law was concerned, it clung to the tradition of its mother country.

Our ancestors brought English law with them when they founded the American colonies. During the colonial period those young men who could afford it journeyed to London to study the law at the Inns of Court. No revolution of a few years’ duration could sever this stout line of descent. No greater compliment could be paid an American lawyer than to remark that he was capable of holding his own with the best in the spirited forensic encounters in Westminster.

It was only natural that our American bar, reveling in the Hastings episode, should yearn to put on a similar show. It was inevitable that an opportunity would arrive.

It first presented itself in the case of Samuel Chase, a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and an ardent and outspoken Federalist who did not hesitate to express his low opinion of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican administration even from the bench. The Republican leaders in Congress took up the challenge. In eight articles members of the House compressed all the complaints of his conduct that had been made since his appointment eight years before and laid the charges before the Senate of the United States.

On February 4, 1805, the Senate, sitting as a Court of Impeachments, convened to hear the case. Mark the influence of the trial of Warren Hastings. The Senate Chamber was remodeled for the occasion. In the center of the scene was the chair of the President of the Court—in this case the Vice-President of the United States. To his right and left were two rows of benches with desks, the whole covered with crimson cloth, like those of the Lords in the trial of Warren Hastings. These were for the thirty-four senators who were to sit in judgment. Facing them were three rows of benches arranged in tiers and covered with green cloth, as had been those of the Commons. These were for members of the House of Representatives. On either side of the chair of the presiding officer were inclosures covered with blue cloth; respectively for the Managers, who were to prosecute the case, and for the lawyers of the defense. Present, too, were the Chief Justice and the associate justices of the Supreme Court.

The young Republic, alas, could produce no peers in gold and ermine. There were no brothers and sons of a ruling monarch, nor an heir apparent conspicuous for his fine person and noble bearing. Nor could the raw and straggling community that then went under the name of Washington present the same array of genius and fashion as London. But it did the best it could with the raw material it had. In the Senate Chamber a temporary gallery had been erected. Here were boxes provided with comfortable seats from which ladies dressed in the height of fashion followed the proceedings.

Who was responsible for this elaborate and colorful setting, so obviously imitating the spectacle of a few years earlier at Westminster? Senator Plumer, of New Hampshire, records that all the arrangements were in the hands of the Vice-President who also presided over the trial. And that Vice-President was Aaron Burr. One might have guessed that no other American statesman boasted the same dramatic instinct. Nor was the stage set without his awareness that he was to play a leading part on it. And he played it well. From at least one none-too-friendly critic he provoked the comment that: “He conducted with the dignity and impartiality of an angel, but with the rigor of a devil.” Burr was greatly pleased with that remark and quoted it in a letter to his daughter, Theodosia. Through February the arguments were heard. Then on March 1 the Senate voted on the charges. The Republicans could not muster enough votes to convict and Vice-President Burr closed the proceedings with the pronouncement that Samuel Chase, Esquire, stood acquitted of all the articles exhibited by the House of Representatives against him.

The impeachment of Chase was the prelude to another legal spectacle soon to follow. Once more the leaders of the American bar were to have an opportunity to emulate their English brethren. As Burr, half-angel and half-devil, presided while Samuel Chase awaited his fate at the hands of the United States Senate, did he have an inkling that in the next cause cÉlÈbre he would appear not as presiding officer, but in the role of the accused?

This time the leaders at the bar were to have as the subject of their contention not a mere associate justice of the Supreme Court but a former Vice-President of the United States. The charge against him was to be not just incompetence in office, but the high crime of treason. An effort was to be made to show that Burr, who had been honored by his countrymen with the second highest elective office in the land, had responded to that generosity by doing his best to split the nation in half while it was still struggling for survival.

The trial was to provide another battleground for the two new political parties—the Federalists, representing wealth and aristocracy and conservatism, and the Jeffersonian Republicans, recruited from the masses and led by a man of no small fortune who was regarded by the Federalists as a dangerous radical and a traitor to his class. It was to be the scene, too, of a fight for power between the executive and the judiciary reflected in the personalities of Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall—a fight not only of immediate moment but one whose outcome was to determine the relative positions of the two branches of government for years to come.

Finally, if the accused was found guilty he faced not simply dismissal from office, but death on the gallows. Even the colorful impeachment of Warren Hastings fell short of that.