Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/45

 creation, as it is in supposal of law a declaration of rightful villenage before, as a confession of other actions; though it is true, as Littleton says, that it shall not bind his issues born before, because the favor of liberty gives them leave to falsify." Hob. 99. To the same effect are Littleton, §§ 176, 185; Co. Lit. 117 b, 122 b; and Hargrave's note 163. The fact that a man might, by confession in a court of record, make himself a slave, no more shows that he could, by mere consent or contract, reduce himself to slavery, than the fact that a plea of guilty will authorize a sentence of death shows that a man may lawfully consent to his own murder. The impossibility of a man's reducing himself to slavery has been well expressed by the court of appeals of Maryland: "Once free and always free, is the maxim of Maryland law upon the subject. Freedom having once vested, by no compact between the master and liberated slave, nor by any condition subsequent, attached by the master to the gift of freedom, can a state of slavery be reproduced." Spencer v. Dennis, 8 Gill, 321.

The most plausible argument, in favor of the position that the return of the slave re-establishes his original condition of slavery, is that sought to be derived from the law of the State into which he returns. The argument is that, as the laws of any State have no extra-territorial effect, except by the comity of the State in which they are sought to be enforced, and as no State allows laws which are contrary to its own policy to be enforced within its limits, therefore the same rule which sets the slave free on his arrival in a State where slavery is prohibited, makes him a slave again upon his return to a State where slavery is established by law. But the fallacy of this argument is, that while slavery is contrary to the laws of a free State, freedom is not contrary to the policy of a slave State; or, in other words, the laws of a free State make every slave who comes under their operation a freeman, but the laws of a slave State do not usually make a freeman a slave.

If there were any statute of the slave State expressly making a negro a slave upon his return, that would, of course, however unjustly, put an end to the free condition which he had acquired, unless he had resided so long in the free State as to become a citizen thereof, in which case he would, at least while he remained a citizen of that State, be entitled to protection by virtue of the provision of the Constitution of the United States, by which the citizens of each State are entitled to all immunities of citizens in the other States; for whatever may be the extent of the