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Updated: June 10, 2025
"Why have you been organizing courts-martial and military commissions all over the South, trying offenders, and punishing some of them with death? Why have you authorized the present Freedmen's Bureau to hold bureau courts all through the South? This has all been done by your permission, and is being done to-day.
Your honor, the President and gentlemen judges of the court, as I am not counsel for the prisoner, nor civil officer, nor lawyer, of whose interference courts-martial are proverbially jealous, I beg you will permit me to say a few words in support, or at least, I will say, in explanation of the vote which you have characterized as an opinion in opposition to fact and law, and unprecedented in the whole history of courts-martial."
The failure to provide any substitute when corporal punishment was abolished for offenses in the Navy has occasioned the convening of numerous courts-martial upon the arrival of vessels in port, and is believed to have had an injurious effect upon the discipline and efficiency of the service.
Vincent, Hawke was now revealed, not to the navy only but to the nation, "through his behavior." Somewhat exceptionally, the king personally took knowledge of him, and stood by him. George II. paid most interested attention to the particulars elicited by the Courts-Martial, a fact which doubtless contributed to make him so sternly unyielding in the case of Byng, twelve years later.
Everywhere the same ferocious system was acted on. The insurgent commanders were tried by courts-martial, and shot without ceremony. At Lugo, where a French squadron of horse had been gallantly and disastrously defeated, the whole of the male inhabitants were massacred.
"Purveyors of false news, or of news likely to depress the public spirit" would be dealt with by courts-martial and punished with the utmost severity. No musical instruments were to be played after ten o'clock at night, and orchestras were prohibited in all restaurants.
Between the year 1880 and the year 1895 there were five general courts- martial held in the city of Washington and I appeared for the defendants in four of them. I was also retained for the investigation of two cases of officers of the Navy who had been convicted by courts-martial, one of them held in the waters of China and the other on the coast of Brazil.
The "Descent on Rochefort," last Autumn, had a good deal disappointed Pitt and England; an expensively elaborate Expedition, military and naval; which could not "descend" at all, when it got to the point; but merely went groping about, on the muddy shores of the Charente, holding councils of war yonder; "cannonaded the Isle of Aix for two hours;" and returned home without result of any kind, Courts-martial following on it, as too usual.
But Captain A was fond of courts-martial; he imagined that they added to his consequence, which certainly required to be upheld by adventitious aid. Moreover, the feeling, too often pervading little minds, that of a dislike taken to a person because you have injured him, and the preferring to accumulate injustice rather than to acknowledge error, had more than due weight with this weak man.
The case of Fox was one of many occurring at about this period, which, however differing in detail between themselves, showed that throughout the navy, both in active service before the enemy, and in the more deliberate criteria of opinion which influence Courts-Martial, there was a pronounced tendency to lowness of standard in measuring officer-like conduct and official responsibility for personal action; a misplaced leniency, which regarded failure to do the utmost with indulgence, if without approval.
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