Impeachment, “the presentment of the most solemn grand inquest of the whole kingdom” had been in use from the earliest days of the English Constitution and government.

The terms “high crimes and misdemeanors,” in their natural sense, embrace a very large field of actions. They are broad enough to cover all criminal misconduct of the President, — all acts of commission or omission forbidden by the Constitution and the laws. To the word “misdemeanor,” indeed, is naturally attached a yet broader signification, which would embrace personal character and behavior as well as the proprieties of official conduct. Nor was, nor is, there any just reason why it should be restricted in this direction; for, in establishing a permanent national government, to insure purity and dignity, to secure the confidence of its own people and command the respect of foreign powers, it is not unfit that civil officers, and most especially the highest of all, the head of the people, should be answerable for personal demeanor.

The term “misdemeanor” was likewise used to designate all legal offences lower than felonies, — all the minor transgressions, all public wrongs, not felonious in character. The common law punished whatever acts were productive of disturbance to the public peace, or tended to incite to the commission of crime, or to injure the health or morals of the people, — such as profanity, drunkenness, challenging to fight, soliciting to the commission of crime, carrying infection through the streets, — an endless variety of offences.

These terms, when used to describe political offences, have a signification coextensive with, or rather analogous to, but yet more extensive than their legal acceptation; for, as John Quincy Adams said, “the Legislature was vested with power of impeaching and removing for trivial transgressions beneath the cognizance of the law.” The sense in which they are used in the Constitution is rendered clearer and more precise by the long line of precedents of decided cases to be found in the State Trials and historical collections. Selden, in his “Judicature of Parliament,” and Coke, in his “Institutes,” refer to many of these, and Comyns names more than fifty impeachable offences. Amongst these are, subverting the fundamental laws and introducing arbitrary power; for an ambassador to give false information to the king; to make a treaty between two foreign powers without the knowledge of the king; to deliver up towns without consent of his colleagues; to incite the king to act against the advice of Parliament; to give the king evil counsel; for the Speaker of the House of Commons to refuse to proceed; for the Lord Chancellor to threaten the other judges to make them subscribe to his opinions.

Wooddeson, who began to lecture in 1777, and whose works express the sense in which the terms were understood by the contemporaries of the founders of the Constitution, says that “such kinds of misdeeds as peculiarly injure the commonwealth by the abuses of high offices of trust are the most proper, and have been the most usual grounds for this kind of prosecution”; — “as, for example, for the Lord Chancellor to act grossly contrary to the duty of his office; for the judges to mislead the sovereign by unconstitutional opinions; for any other magistrates to attempt to subvert the fundamental laws, or introduce arbitrary power, as for a Privy-Councillor to propose or support pernicious or dishonorable practices.”