This feast of St. Patrick’s Day provides an occasion for those of Irish ancestry to be grateful for the missionary zeal of St. Patrick. This gratitude can combat complacency, especially for those of us blessed to be Americans of Irish ancestry.

A debate is raging today whether the Trump Administration violated a federal court order by transferring non-citizens in federal custody to the custody of a prison in El Salvador after a temporary restraining order had been ordered. One historical episode this debate calls to mind is the debate over President John Adams’s transfer of Thomas Nash (aka Jonathan Robbins) to British authorities under a provision of the Jay Treaty. For a somewhat slanted summary that was state of the art as of about 100 years ago, you can read Albert Beveridge’s account in Volume 2 of his John Marshall biography.

Writing to South Carolinian Charles Pinckney on October 29, 1799, Thomas Jefferson stated of this cause célèbre that “no one circumstance since the establishment of our government has affected the popular mind more.” Jeffersonian newspapers depicted Adams’s extradition of Nash as an executive usurpation of judicial power. At issue was whether Adams’s determination that Nash was a British subject (as he was asserted to be by the British, who then had the Irish in their subjection) or an American (as Nash and the Jeffersonians claimed). In his account of this episode, Beveridge quotes the Aurora (or Aurora General Advertiser)—a leading Jeffersonian paper in Philadelphia—as stating: “It is enough to call a man an Irishman, to make it no murder to pervert the law of nations and to degrade national honor and character. . . . Look at what has been done in the case of Jonathan Robbins. … A British lieutenant who never saw him until he was prisoner at Charleston swears his name is Thomas Nash. [So] [t]he man is hanged!”