A corollary which necessarily follows from the doctrine of federal supremacy is that no State can declare criminal and punish as such acts authorized by federal law. Since the Civil War this has not been directly denied by the States, but it has been strenuously asserted by them that when an offense has been committed against their own peace, and the one committing it has been apprehended and brought to trial before their own courts, he is not entitled to have his case removed at once to the federal courts simply by setting up as a defense that his act was done in pursuance of an authority delegated him by the General Government. The right to set up this defense has not been denied by the States, nor have they claimed that, should the decision of their courts be adverse to him upon this point, he may not take an appeal from their highest tribunals to the Supreme Court of the United States. But they have asserted that when an act has been committed which is criminal by their laws, it is, primarily, an offense against their peace, and as such cognizable only in their own courts, and, therefore, that though, as has been just said, a right of appeal from their highest courts to the United States Supreme Court upon the questions of federal authority must be allowed, the trial of the offense may not, as a matter of right, be removed by the accused from the state court in which it is begun to one of the lower federal courts.

These lower federal courts, as is well known, possess only those powers which have been granted to them by act of Congress. By the original Judiciary Act1 Congress did not, as it might have, endow these tribunals with a general jurisdiction in proceedings against federal officers based upon their official acts. By the famous Force Act of 1833, however, an act passed at the time of South Carolina's attempted nullification of the United States tariff law, it was provided that "when any civil suit or criminal prosecution is commenced in any court of a State against any officer appointed under, or acting by authority of, any revenue law of the United States, now or hereafter enacted, or against any person acting by or under authority of any such officer, or on account of any act done under color of his office," the case, at the defendant's instance, might be at once removed from the state to the federal courts for trial.

1 1 Stat, at L. 73.