1861.] OF THE SENATE. 253

Armorers of the State, within the space of twenty days after the
company, for whose use they were furnished, shall have been dis-
solved or disbanded."

When a uniformed volunteer company has thus been supplied
with arms and given bond for the same, according to law, the
Governor has no authority, by law, to interfere with or take away
their arms, as long as they preserve their organization. Any
order issued by the Governor to strip the company of their arms,
as long as they are a legally organized company, is a gross viola-
tion of law. If they do not preserve the arms and keep them fit
for duty, their bond is responsible. But the Governor has no
power to seize the arms. If, however, under any circumstances,
he could be justified in seizing the arms, he violated the provi-
sions of the law by ordering the arms to be deposited at Fort
McHenry—a Fort not belonging to the State of Maryland.

The disarming, therefore, of the regular organized uniformed
companies of Baltimore, and the removal of the public arms from
the armory at Easton, and placing them in Fort McHenry, and
the distribution of the public arms that were in the armory at
Frederick, to ununiformed citizens or association of citizens, by
order of the Governor, were all, and each of them, a palpable
usurpation of authority, which ought not to be tolerated. The
law has invested the Governor with no such power.

The forty-third section of the sixty-third article authorizes the
Governor to adopt measures to collect, preserve, distribute, deli-
ver and re-deliver the arms, accoutrements and ammunition be-
longing to the State; but this section cannot be construed with-
out a manifest perversion of the provisions of the militia system
into an authority, to the Governor, to strip the organized and
uniformed volunteer companies of the State of their arms, for
which they had bonded according to law. The provisions of this
section were intended to give the Governor the power to collect
and re-deliver or place in the armories the arms of the State, in the
hands of disbanded companies, and companies whose members
do not amount to thirty-two men in uniform.

The Governor says, in his message, that he "issued the orders
for reclaiming the arms referred to, because he had become satis-
fied that many of them had been carried beyond the limits of the
State of Maryland, for disloyal purposes." He does not point to
any source from which proof could be obtained to establish the
charge against the disarmed companies; nor does he say from
what source he obtained his information, whether it was "from a
reliable source not accessible to the people," or from anonymous
letters. Your Committee, however, have not been able to dis-
cover that any of the arms of the State were so carried beyond
the limits of the State.