The necessity of a like authority over forts, magazines, etc.,
established by the general government, is not less evident. The public
money expended on such places, and the public property deposited in
them, requires that they should be exempt from the authority of the
particular State. Nor would it be proper for the places on which the
security of the entire Union may depend, to be in any degree dependent
on a particular member of it. All objections and scruples are here also
obviated, by requiring the concurrence of the States concerned, in every
such establishment.
3. "To declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason
shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, except during the life of
the person attained."
As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of
the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled
and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent
factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked
their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great
judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a
constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for
conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it,
from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its
author.
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