Article 3, Section 3, Clauses 1 and 2



Document 17

James Madison, Federalist, no. 43, 290

23 Jan. 1788

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 Governments, have usually wrecked 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.


The Founders' Constitution
Volume 4, Article 3, Section 3, Clauses 1 and 2, Document 17
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a3_3_1-2s17.html
The University of Chicago Press

Hamilton, Alexander; Madison, James; and Jay, John. The Federalist. Edited by Jacob E. Cooke. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Easy to print version.