the propriety of a letter from your office to such of the invalids as have been certified to be proper for pensions, and perhaps it may be well to intimate the turn which the affair has taken and I have just mentioned. It was very unlucky that, although one of the invalids was in Court when I made the motion, and heard the difficulty, he omitted to notify himself to me until the Court had risen and it was too late."[1]
The Attorney-General's action producing no results, a petition for mandamus against the Secretary of War was brought by a petitioner, John Chandler, which was heard on February 5 and decided February 14, 1794, in which the Court ruled: "Having considered the two Acts of Congress relating to the same, we are of opinion that a mandamus cannot issue to the Secretary of War for the purpose expressed in said motion." Three days later, another suit brought by the United States against a pensioner, Yale Todd, was decided in which the Court held in substance that the decisions of the Judges acting as Commissioners were without legal force. In both of these cases, the Court appears to have found it unnecessary to pass upon the constitutionality of the Act of 1792, for it held that the construction and theory of the Act adopted by the Judges, that it gave them authority to act as Commissioners, and not as Judges of the Court was untenable.[2] The
- ↑ Amer. State Papers, Misc., I, No. 47; letter of Aug. 4, 1798; see The Case of John Chandler, by Gordon E. Sherman, Yale Law Rev. (1905), XIV; 7th Cong., 1st Sess., 742, 772, 780, 903, 904; United States v. Yale Todd, reported in 13 How. 52, note. The Act of Congress referred to was Section 3 of the Act of February 28, 1798 (1 Stat. 325): "It shall be the duty of the Secretary of War, in conjunction with the Attorney General, to take such measures as may be necessary to obtain an adjudication of the Supreme Court of the United States on the validity of any such rights claimed under the acts aforesaid, by the determination of certain persons styling themselves commissioners." Neither the Chandler nor the Todd cases were reported in Dallas Reports.
- ↑ See letter of Attorney-General Bradford to the Secretary of War, Feb. 17, 1794, announcing the result as follows: "That Court has this day determined (in the case of Todd) that such adjudications are not valid"; and letter of Secre-
