Treason

Treason —betraying the nation‐state that the American military was created to defend—is among the most odious of crimes. Yet American history suggests how fine the line can be between patriot and traitor.

The founding fathers had to become traitors to their king in order to create the United States. The Declaration of Independence articulated the conditions—tyranny—under which a people might legitimately renounce their allegiance to one sovereign authority and transfer it to another.

Efforts to punish disloyalty to the new nation predated its independence. On 24 June, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a motion by its Committee on Spies recommending that individual colonies punish those “who shall levy war against any of the said colonies … or be adherent to the King of Great Britain….” Thus authorized, the revolutionary factions in the individual colonies punished as traitors avowed Tories, along with those who uttered favorable opinions about the king, had contact with the British, or entered British‐controlled territories. The emphasis was on protecting the new nation, not the rights or intent of the accused. Punishment most often involved confiscation of property and exile. The revolutionaries justified such severity by the presumption that, as the Virginia treason statute suggested, “all countries have a Right to the personal services” of their inhabitants.

Treason was given an enduring symbol in 1780 when Gen. Benedict Arnold, disillusioned with the revolutionary cause, unsuccessfully schemed to surrender the army garrison at West Point to the British, fleeing to the British after his plot was discovered. Arnold's name remains synonymous with betrayal in American history.

The excesses of the Revolution prompted the framers of the Constitution to restrict the definition of treason to “levying war against” the United States and providing “aid and comfort” to its enemies, and to require the testimony of two witnesses “to the same overt act” and the establishment of treasonous intent for conviction. They limited punishment to the person charged, and abjured the attainder of the traitor's relatives or heirs. Thus the framers hoped to balance the security of the state with the protection of private property and individual rights and to prevent the charge of treason from becoming an instrument of political repression.

The first application of the Constitution's treason provisions occurred in 1794 with the Whiskey Rebellion. Federal troops led by George Washington quashed this challenge to central authority, and a federal circuit court condemned to death two men—whom Washington later pardoned—for treason.

A major landmark in the evolution of treason law occurred in the 1807 trial of Aaron Burr, who stood accused of attempting to establish an independent trans‐Appalachian empire. Although circumstantial evidence pointed toward the defendant's guilt, the government's inability to prove that an overt act of treason had occurred resulted in Burr's acquittal. In a victory for a narrow interpretation of the law of treason, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that “the difficulty of proving a fact will not justify conviction without proof.”

During the Mexican War (1846–48), religious allegiance took precedence over national loyalty for several hundred Irish immigrant U.S. troops who deserted to the Mexican Army when the Mexican government appealed to them to defend Catholicism and promised them land. The “San Patricio Brigade” put up fierce resistance against U.S. units at the Battle of Churubusco before surrendering to Gen. Winfield Scott, who executed fifty of them for treason.

In 1859, John Brown and his followers, in the name of God and slave liberation, seized the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as part of a plan to establish a free guerrilla state. Although Brown had attacked U.S. property, Governor Henry Wise had the conspirators tried for treason against Virginia. This assertion of state jurisdiction reflected the assumptions that soon produced the secession of the Southern states in 1861, the most significant act of treason in American history. Suppression of the rebellion was based on the assumption that the Union was permanent and that secession from it could never be justified.

Although the Constitution defines treason strictly, Congress has expanded the definition of treasonous behavior by legislation such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and and the Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I (1917; 1918), which punished political expression deemed hazardous to the state. Both sets of legislation proved controversial. The acts of 1798 provoked the violent opposition of the emerging Jeffersonian Republican Party and facilitated the election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1801. The acts of 1917–18 legitimated a government crackdown on dissent of all kinds and foreshadowed the crisis atmosphere of the Red Scare of the 1920s.

The Cold War saw the charge of treason used to build political careers and silence dissent. Congressman Richard M. Nixon first came to prominence in 1948 investigating a State Department employee, Alger Hiss, for his alleged activities as a Communist Party contact in the 1930s. In 1952, Senator Joseph McCarthy, alleging “twenty years of treason,” launched his campaign to eliminate alleged traitors in the federal government. McCarthyism made dissent tantamount to treason. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed in 1953 for passing secrets to the Soviets, were condemned by many for being traitors.

Jonathan Pollard, a Defense Department analyst convicted in 1985 of passing vital secrets to Israel, remains incarcerated in spite of continued pressure from the Israeli government for his release. The quantity and importance of the information Pollard leaked constitutes one of the most significant security breaches in U.S. history.

In recent years, treason has tended to be committed for monetary gain rather than ideological commitment. Typical of this trend are Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials Aldrich Ames and Harold James Nicholson. Ames, before being discovered in 1994, passed extensive information on U.S. intelligence operatives abroad to Soviet and Russian agents. Nicholson, who confessed in March 1997 to passing secrets to the Russians, is the highest ranking CIA employee to be caught spying.
[See also Patriotism.]

Bibliography

Nathaniel Weyl , Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History, 1950.
Bradley Chapin , The American Law of Treason: Revolutionary and Early National Origins, 1964.
James Willard Hurst , The Law of Treason in the United States: Collected Essays, 1971.

William Earl Weeks