It was a Spring morning when Mr. Robert Woods got walked outside of his small home in St. Augustine, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and realized it was already way too muggy. This was not news to him. He had lived in the area, or at least had his permanent residence there, for nearly twenty years at this point, since his father had moved there when he was young. If anywhere was home, it was the British colony of East Florida, which had been under British possession for those nearly twenty years after the Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War and gave Florida from Spain to Great Britain as a reward for British dominance in that contest.

Robert went to his hammock and hoped that a sea breeze would pick up at some point. He knew, from long experience, that if the sea breeze did not pick up at some point, the heat would become intolerable. If it was spring now, the summer would be far worse, he mused to himself as he opened up one of his favorite books and something that was absolutely essential to any gentlemen who, like he did, dabbled in the law. Blackstone’s Commentaries had only been published in America for a short time before he had obtained it, and if there was one book that everyone needed to know to be anything in the field of law, this book was it. Blackstone, whom Robert did not in fact know, though they did have some common friends, he would have found out had he been more curious about pursuing the matter with his acquaintances in England, was a living legend who even in his own time was renowned for his insights about law and the legal profession.

It was not far into his reading before Robert found a passage that made him reflect on the reading as a whole. “An unwarrantable act without a vicious will is no crime at all. So that to constitute a crime against human laws, there must be, first, a vicious will; and, secondly, an unlawful act consequent upon such vicious will.” As every lawyer knew, and though Robert was by no means a legendary lawyer, he was at least a fair practitioner of the art, at least by the modest standards of his place and time, a crime required both a criminal mind–mens rea–and a criminal act. An act that was wrong that was not done out of malice aforethought was a tort, and not a crime. To be sure, there were damages as a result of a tort, but one could not properly consider someone a criminal without a vicious will.

Robert thought to himself about why it was so important that a crime required a corrupt and criminal mind. It was all too easy for people to be innocently mistaken, to do things by accident or mischance, and to deny people the protection of that innocence was to make everyone a potential criminal to be subject to the whim of those in authority. As a proud and patriotic British citizen, of good Yorkshire stock, the eldest son of the second son of a Viscount, Robert had no patience for tyrants. It was one of the few things he could agree upon with some of the more disagreeable and bumptious of the people he had to deal with, the colonists of the Southern colonies where he often had to travel on official business.

Robert’s thoughts were engrossed by his thinking on mens rea and its implications when someone came up and startled him by speaking to him.

“Mister Woods,” came a vaguely familiar voice.

Robert’s shock was visible as he looked up from his book. “Excuse me, sir?”

“Mister Woods,” I am Lieutenant Sanders, and the British government has need of your services.”

“How so?” Robert answered, mildly curious.

“There is a matter of considerable urgency that requires your assistance,” the officer continued.

“Do you care to explain it here or do you need to explain it elsewhere?” Robert queried, thinking that his reading time was being unnecessarily interrupted. How right he was.

“I would prefer to explain it while we are sailing, as it will give me some way of usefully spending the time,” Sanders continued. Robert did not like the sound of this at all.

“Where do you need me to go?” Robert asked, half dreadin the answer.

“We need you in Charleston,” Sanders continued. “It requires your legal expertise and your solid sense of justice.”

Robert’s heart sank within him. He had figured it would be something of this nature. “Let me guess, there is a case that is of interest, for reasons I cannot fathom, to the government there, and there is no one else on the scene who is willing to take up the case?”

“That is precisely it, but we must hurry. As soon as the case was brought to our attention, your name came up as being the only person who could pull it off, and so at once we rushed here to find you, hoping that we would not have to search long,” Sanders said.

Though indisposed to hurry, Robert got up from his hammock, where he had hoped to spend the hours in calm and enjoyable reflection and reading, and walked towards his house. “What will I need to bring with me?” he asked, mainly to himself.

“Just bring clothes suitable for court. The rest you will be able to borrow when you are there, I dare say. You will lack for nothing as far as your supplies, and of course we will take care of your housing while you are in service of the government,” Sanders said.

“Those are the usual terms when I am summoned for such services,” he said. “Well, I will grab some clothes and put them into the usual carpetbag and then I suppose we can be off,” he said, abruptly. Sanders merely nodded.

It did not take long for Robert to grab some suitable clothes for appearing in court, along with some material for reading and writing, and it did not take long at all for him to be joining Sanders on the small boat that would take them to the vessel waiting just offshore for them.

After they were on the vessel, Lieutenant Sanders accompanied Robert down to the quarters they would share during their trip. The vessel was a small one, fit for the coastal trade, such as dragging provincial lawyers out of their peaceful reverie for government business, and was not intended for long and comfortable voyages. It was precisely the sort of ship that Robert was familiar with on his travels, not being someone who tended to spend a lot of money for his own comfort, not when the government was willing to spend money on his services.

“Well, would you like to make me familiar with the business that required you to interrupted my reading and relaxing?” Robert said, evenly, when they sat down in the quarters, each on their own small bed.

“A young man was brought into the courthouse on the accusation of having committed a murder most foul. That would be enough cause for concern for the legal community of Charleston in these dangerous times,” Sanders began, to which Robert nodded. “There are, however, additional concerns that made it impossible for any of the usual local lawyers to take up the case. You see, the young man to be tried is himself of African descent, and he made two claims in his initial discussion that sent the court into a frenzy. For one, he said that any violence he committed, having denied any intent to murder or even to harm the deceased, was in self defense. And for another, he said that the deceased was his father. Once those claims were made no one was willing to defend him in court.”

“I do not see how either of those claims should prevent someone from receiving effective counsel, even in a city as devoid of a proper sense of justice as Charleston is,” Robert said harshly, “especially if such claims happen to be true.”

“I knew you would feel that way,” Sanders said, jubilantly. “That is why we knew you were the right person for the job.”

“Good luck trying to convince a jury in Charleston of that fact. Let me guess, they are filling the jury pool with the local whites, with not a single black man to be found?” Robert queried.

“That is the local custom. I believe that local law and custom prohibits blacks from serving on any sort of criminal jury,” Sanders said delicately.

“That is as I understand it as well,” Robert replied. “You know the problems I have had with the legal system there.”

“I know it all too well,” Sanders said. “But you are the only person who would be willing to make an argument that would save a man whose life is at stake, and so we felt that you had to be the one who would try this case as an advocate for the young man in question.”

“I do not see why this is of interest to the government, though,” Robert continued. “Justice is certainly a matter of great importance in general, and to the young man and his family–I presume he has a family,” at which Sanders nodded in agreement, “–justice must be a particularly deep interest, but what interest is it to the government as a whole?”

“It so happens that this young man has been of great use to the British government in terms of helping various British military units in the tricky areas around Charleston and the rivers in the area, in dealing with the local waters. Indeed, it was this matter of helping the British so conspicuously that appears to have begun the quarrel in the first place,” Sanders replied.

To Robert things were now clear. A young man, no doubt seeking to have his freedom secured by the British, who were far less hostile to the interests of Africans than the local population, who thought that a free black man was almost a contradiction in terms, it seemed, had been of use to the British, and so the British, in his hour of need, sought to be of use to him. “I see,” was all Robert needed to say, because he indeed saw, at last, what had driven Sanders to rush to him. Given the temper of the city and its population, every day or night of delay only made it more likely that someone would attempt to take justice into their own hand and, to encourage the local blacks to maintain a properly submissive attitude, put a young man to death who might not have done anything criminal at all, but whose supply of self-dignity in defending himself against violence from a white man, even his father, would be abhorrent to local mores.

Sanders, seeing that Robert was now mentally engaged in the challenging task at hand of taking the case, did not feel it necessary to say anything more as the ship continued on its way to Charleston.