The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
3. "To declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason
shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, except during the life of
the person attained."
As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of
the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled
and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent
factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked
their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great
judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a
constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for
conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing
it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its
author.