Early Efforts to Restrict Slavery

How much at variance with the plain teachings of history were these statements, let our public records testify. In the English-American colonies, the most enlightened men looked on slavery with great disfavor, as a moral wrong, and they made attempts, from time to time, to limit or eradicate it. The utterances and writings of men like General Washington, Henry Laurens, Thomas Jefferson, and other slaveholders, and of Dr. Franklin, John Jay, and many leading patriots of the Revolution, directly refute the assertion of Judge Taney, that in their time Africans by descent were "never thought or spoken of except as property." The Declaration of Independence, framed by a slaveholder, was a solemn protest against human bondage in every form; and in his original draft of that document, Mr. Jefferson made the protest stronger than the Congress finally approved.

Among the public acts of the fathers of the Republic in favor of human freedom and restriction of the slave-system, was the famous Ordinance of 1787 (see page 1114), adopted before the National Constitution was framed, which was the final result of an effort commenced in the Continental Congress in 1784 to restrict slavery. That effort was made in proposing a plan for the government of a Territory including the whole region west of the old thirteen States, as far south as the thirty-first degree of north latitude, and embracing several of the late slave-labor States. The plan was submitted by a committee, of which Thomas Jefferson was chairman. It contemplated the ultimate division of that Territory into seventeen States, eight of them below the latitude of the present city of Louisville, in Kentucky. Among the rules for the government of that region, reported by Mr. Jefferson, was the following: "That after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been convicted to be personally guilty." On motion of Carolinians, this clause was stricken out. A majority of the States were in favor of it, but as it required the votes of nine States to carry a proposition, it was not adopted. This rule, omitting the words "after the year 1800 of the Christian Era," was incorporated in the Ordinance of 1787, above alluded to, and so secured freedom to the territory northward of the Ohio River.

The mother-country, from which a larger portion of the patriots of our Revolution had sprung, had just swept slavery from the dominions of Great Britain when the old war for independence was a-kindling. It was done by a decision of Chief Justice Mansfield in the case of James Somerset, a native of Africa, who was first carried to Virginia and sold as a slave, then taken to England by his master, and there induced, by philanthropic men, to assert his freedom. Chief Justice Mansfield decided that he was a free man.

So early as 1597, it was held by the lawyers in England, that "negroes being usually bought and sold among merchants as merchandise, and also being infidels, there might be a property in them sufficient to maintain trover," or the gaining possession of any goods by whatever means. This position was overruled by Chief Justice Holt, who decided that "so soon as a negro lands in England, he is free." It was to this decision that Cowper alluded in his lines:

In 1702, Justice Holt also decided that "there is no such thing as a slave by the laws of England;" but in 1729, an opinion was obtained from the crown-lawyer, that negroes legally enslaved elsewhere might be held as slaves in England, and that baptism was no bar to the master's claim. This was a sort of fugitive slave-law for the benefit of the English-American colonists, that was obeyed until the sweeping decision of Chief Justice Mansfield, which would have abolished slavery here had not the Revolution broken out soon afterward.

After Chief Justice Taney had made his declaration about the feelings of our forefathers concerning the negro as a man, he declared that the Missouri Compromise Act and all other acts for the restriction of slavery were unconstitutional; and that neither Congress nor local legislatures had any authority for restricting the spread of the institution all over the Union. The majority of the Supreme Court sustained not only the legitimate decision, but the extra-judicial opinion of the Chief Justice; and the dominant party who had elected Mr. Buchanan assumed that the decision was final--that slavery was a national institution having the right to exist anywhere in the Union, and that Mr. Toombs might legally "call the roll of his slaves on Bunker's Hill." It was assumed by the leaders of that party that, in consequence of the promulgated opinion of five or six fallible men, evidently based upon a perversion of historical facts, the nation was bound to consent to the turning back of the bright tide of Christian civilization into the darker channels of a barbarous age from which it had escaped. To this proposition the conscience of the nation refused acquiescence. Large numbers of the dominant party deserted their leaders, and every lover of freedom was impelled to prepare for the inevitable conflict which this extra-judicial opinion of the highest court in the land would certainly arouse. It being extra-judicial, it was no more binding, in law, upon the people, than was the opinion of any citizen of the Republic.