In Freeman v. Howe (1860) 65 U.S. 450, a state court was seeking to interfere with a United States Marshal's seizure. In that case, mortgagees of some railroad cars brought a state replevin action against a marshal who had attached the cars to secure judgment in a federal diversity suit. Although the mortgagees prevailed at trial, the Supreme Courtreversed, holding that the state court was powerless to interfere with property within the control of the federal court. The Court noted that ancillary jurisdiction was available in federal court over the mortgagees' claims, and therefore they could have intervened in the federal action. Mr. Justice Nelson, speaking for the court in Freeman v. Howe, said: "The principle is, that a bill filed on the equity side of the court to restrain or regulate judgments or suits at law in the same court, and thereby prevent injustice, or an inequitable advantage under mesne or final process, is not an original suit, but ancillary and dependent, supplementary merely to the original suit, out of which it had arisen, and is maintained without reference to the citizenship or residence of the parties." "In the case of conflicting authorities under a state and federal process, on which property has been seized, the question as to which authority shall for the time prevail, does not depend upon the rights of the respective parties to the property seized, but upon the question, which jurisdiction had first attached by the seizure and custody of the property under its process." The point of the decision in Freeman v. Howe, is that when property is taken and held under process, mesne or final, of a court of the United States, it is in the custody of the law and within the exclusive jurisdiction of the court from which the process has issued, for the purposes of the writ: that the possession of the officer cannot be disturbed by process from any state court, because to disturb that possession would be to invade the jurisdiction of the court by whose command it is held, and to violate the law which that jurisdiction is appointed to administer; that any person, not a party to the suit or judgment, whose property has been wrongfully but under color of process taken and withheld, may prosecute, by ancillary proceedings, in the court whence the process issued, his remedy for restitution of the property or its proceeds, while remaining in the control of the Supreme Court. It was there adjudged that property taken and held by a marshal on a writ of attachment from a court of the United States, directing him to attach the property of one person, could not be taken from his possession on a writ of replevin from a state court in behalf of another person who claimed the attached property as his own.