early English
constitutional right to be protected from military law or molestation
by the army, and the corresponding right of protection of one's
person, or one's house, by force, if necessary.

The right of law, even as against the military, has been anticipated
in an early chapter; the right to try an officer, or even a soldier
obeying orders, in the ordinary tribunals, for homicide, or for
ordinary trespass, as when, in the Dorr rebellion in Rhode Island,
a company of militia invaded a woman's house.[1] The constitutional
principle against the quartering of soldiers upon private dwellings,
and the limitations to the military power caused by the strict
confinement of the use of the army to cases of invasion or
insurrection, have been added by American constitutions. But most
important of all is the supremacy of the common law; the grudging
permission of military law even to the army themselves only by
a temporary vote; for in England, the Mutiny Act must be passed
annually, and in the United States, appropriations for the army and
navy may not last over two years. It is these statutes alone that
make possible the very government of the army, the enforcement of the
contract of enlistment, and the condign punishment of deserters.

[Footnote 1: Martin _v_. Mott, 12 Wheaton, 19.]

For example, let us remember the Boston Massacre. Ten years before the
Revolution, some turbulent men, mostly negroes, started a riot against
British soldiers on what is now State Street (then King Street), and
under the orders of the commanding officer the soldiers fired, and two
or three men were killed. Yet although the colonies were already under
military occupation, and their courts and legislatures more than
unpopular with the home government, these British soldiers were tried
for manslaughter and murder, not in England, but in the ordinary
common-law courts of the Colony of Massachusetts. James Otis defended
them and they were acquitted. The fact that a monument to Crispus
Attocks, the negro, now stands on Boston Common, and that ten or
twelve years later the British flag was expelled from Boston to seek
refuge in New York, does not modify the significance of the incident.
Some years since in a Pennsylvania strike a small company of militia,
being attacked by a mob, were ordered to fire. They did so, and killed
one of the striking rioters. It was found out which private had fired
the fatal shot; he was indicted and tried for murder;