Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/38

 the prohibition of slavery in a Territory of the United States is a violation of the provision of the Constitution, that "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." There is at least as much ground to say that this clause prohibits slavery in all the Territories of the United States. If the construction suggested be sound, the words have been misunderstood for ages. They are contained in every written Constitution with which we are acquainted; borrowed from Magna Charta, they have been inserted in the Constitution of every State of the Union, as well those which prohibit, as those which allow slavery; they are found in the Ordinance of 1787, side by side with the clause by which slavery is prohibited. If this new doctrine be true, emancipation by operation of law without the consent of the master is impossible; all the decisions by which slaves brought from one State into another have been held to become free, under any circumstances, are founded in error; and the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1844, unconstitutionally deprived a slaveholder of his property, by declaring that a slave carried from one part of the District of Columbia into another became free by the operation of the laws of Maryland continued in force by act of congress. Rhodes v. Bell, 2 Howard, 397. That case is also a judicial refutation of Mr. Calhoun's doctrine; for it cannot be pretended that the citizens of any part of the United States are entitled to greater rights in a distant Territory, than in the District of Columbia, the seat of the national government.

III. The notion entertained by many persons, that it was decided in the case of Dred Scott, that a slave may be taken by his master into a State where slavery is prohibited by law, and yet not be entitled to claim his freedom there, is not justified by the positions announced by any judge as the ground of his opinion; though we fear it may be a fair inference, if not an unavoidable consequence, of the assumption that the Constitution guaranties the right to take slaves wherever the master may please, within the Territory of the United States.

But on this point the law of England, as well as of this and all other civilized countries, is too well settled to require an accumulation of authorities. Most of them are collected by Mr. Justice Story, in section 96 of his Treatise on the Conflict of Laws, where he says: "There is a uniformity of opinion among foreign jurists, and foreign tribunals, in giving no effect to the state of slavery of a party, whatever it