Eureka Rebellion participant Raffaello Carboni
"The shepherds' holes inside the lower part of the stockade had been turned into rifle-pits, and were now occupied by Californians of the I.C. Rangers' Brigade, some twenty or thirty in all, who had kept watch at the 'outposts' during the night." 
However, the location of the stockade has been described as "appalling from a defensive point of view," as it was situated on "a gentle slope, which exposed a sizeable portion of its interior to fire from nearby high ground." A detachment of 800 men, which included "two field pieces and two howitzers" under the commander in chief of the British forces in Australia, Major General Sir Robert Nickle, who had also seen action during the 1798 Irish rebellion, would arrive after the insurgency had been put down.At 4 am on the morning of 1 December, the rebels were observed to be massing on Bakery Hill, but a government raiding party found the area vacated. Again Rede ordered the riot act read to a mob that had gathered around Bath's Hotel, with mounted police breaking up the unlawful assembly. Raffaello Carboni, George Black and Father Smyth meet with Rede to present a peace proposal. Rede is suspicious of the chartist undercurrent of the anti-mining tax movement and rejects the proposals as being the way forward.The rebels sent out scouts and established picket lines in order to have advance warning of Rede's movements. Messengers were dispatched to other mining settlements, including Bendigo and Creswick, requesting reinforcements for the Eureka Stockade. The "moral force" faction, led by Humffray, withdrew from the protest movement the previous day as the men of violence moved into the ascendancy. The rebels continued to fortify their position as 300–400 men arrived from Creswick's Creek to join the struggle. Carboni recalls they were: "dirty and ragged, and proved the greatest nuisance. One of them, Michael Tuohy, behaved valiantly." The arrival of these reinforcements required the dispatch of foraging parties, leaving a garrison of around 200 men behind. Teddy Shanahan, a merchant whose store on the Eureka lead had been engulfed by the stockade, said the rebels immediately became very short on food, drink, and accommodation and that by the evening before the battle:Trials for sedition and high treason
The first trial relating to the rebellion was a charge of sedition against Henry Seekamp of the Ballarat Times. Seekamp was tried and convicted of seditious libel by a Melbourne jury on 23 January 1855 and, after a series of appeals, sentenced to six months imprisonment on 23 March. He was released from prison on 28 June 1855, precisely three months early. During Seekamp's absence, Clara would serve as editor of the Ballarat Times.Of the approximately 120 individuals detained after the battle, thirteen were put on trial for high treason. There were: Timothy Hayes, Raffaello Carboni, John Manning, John Joseph, Jan Vennick, James Beattie, Henry Reid, Michael Tuohy, James Macfie Campbell, William Molloy, Jacob Sorenson, Thomas Dignum, John Phelan.
The African American John Joseph was tried first in a trial where matters of fact were decided by a lay juries drawn from a general public that was largely sympathetic to the rebel cause. One of the junior counsels for Joseph was Butler Cole Aspinall, who appeared pro bono. Formerly chief of parliamentary reporting for The Argus before returning to practice and was elected to the Legislative Assembly in the wake of the Eureka trials. He would receive many other criminal briefs later in his legal career, including that of Henry James O’Farrell, who was indicted for an 1868 assassination attempt on the Duke of Edinburgh in Sydney. Gavan Duffy said of Aspinall that he was: "one of the half-dozen men whose undoubted genius gave the Parliament of Victoria a first place among colonial legislatures."When the jury's verdict of not guilty was greeted by applause with two men being sentenced to a week in prison for contempt. Over 10,000 people had come to hear the jury's verdict. Joseph was carried around the streets of Melbourne in a chair in triumph, according to The Ballarat Star.Manning's case was the next to be heard. The indicted rebels were acquitted in quick succession, with the last five all being tried together on 27 March. The lead defence counsel Archibald Michie observed that the proceedings had become "weary, stale, flat, dull and unprofitable." The trials have, on several occasions, been described as a farce.
As Molony points out, the legality of putting a foreign national on trial for treason had been settled as far back as 1649. However, the difficulty the Crown prosecutor faced was that: