Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/56

 master's will, took effect. The court said, that if this were an open question, it might be urged with some force that the condition of the children, until their mother's emancipation, was not that of absolute slavery; but was, by the will, converted into a modified servitude, to end when the emancipation should take effect; that if the mother was not an absolute slave, it would seem to follow that the children would stand in the same condition. But upon the ground that by the decisions of the supreme court of Tennessee, although there was no statute on the subject, a female thus situated was considered a slave, whose manumission was only conditional, and, until the condition happened upon which freedom was to take effect, remained to all intents and purposes an absolute slave, the children were adjudged to be absolute slaves. M'Cutchen v. Marshall, 8 Peters, 241.

The other case was decided in 1850. It was a suit brought on a statute of Kentucky by the master of slaves, against the captain of a steamboat, to recover the value of slaves escaping into a free State; the defence relied on was that the slaves were free, by reason of having previously been in Ohio with their master's consent; but as it appeared that they had never resided for any time in Ohio, and had remained in their master's service two years after their return, the court of appeals of Kentucky gave judgment for the plaintiff; and the defendant brought the case by writ of error to the supreme court of the United States. And Chief Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the court, clearly laid down the doctrine thus: "Every State has an undoubted right to determine the status, or domestic and social condition of persons domiciled within its territory; except in so far as the powers of the States in this respect are restrained, or duties and obligations imposed upon them, by the Constitution of the United States. There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that can in any degree control the law of Kentucky upon this subject. And the condition of the negroes, therefore, as to freedom or slavery, after their return, depended altogether upon the laws of that State, and could not be influenced by the laws of Ohio. It was exclusively in the power of Kentucky to determine for itself whether their employment in another State should or should not make them free on their return. The court of appeals have determined that by the laws of the State they continued to be slaves. And their judgment upon this point is, upon this writ of error, conclusive upon this court, and we have no jurisdiction over it." "The