State and Federal Court Cases: Primary Sources for Slavery and Abolition

Four decisions handed down between 1834 and 1859 tell a single story: the steady closing of every legal avenue out of slavery. Read in sequence, they explain something essential about John Brown — why a man who revered the Declaration of Independence and drafted his own constitution concluded that the courts would never deliver what the founding documents promised.

Brown was not indifferent to law. He was saturated in it. He wrote a Provisional Constitution, convened a formal convention to ratify it, and issued a Declaration of Liberty modeled line-by-line on Jefferson's. But by 1859 he had watched the Supreme Court rule that Black Americans could not be citizens, that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories, and that no state court could shelter a man who defied the Fugitive Slave Act. In his Declaration of Liberty, Brown named the Chief Justice directly: "They have made judges (Taney) dependent on their will alone, for the tenure of their office, & the amount & payment of their salaries."

All four opinions are free to read in full.

Jack v. Martin (1834, 1835)

12 Wendell 311 (N.Y. Supreme Court, 1834); 14 Wendell 507 (N.Y. Court for the Correction of Errors, 1835) → Full text at the Historical Society of the New York Courts · Free full text

A man named Jack escaped from Louisiana and reached New York City. Mary Martin, claiming ownership, had him seized under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 — a statute that let a claimant haul an alleged fugitive before any magistrate, prove ownership by affidavit, and remove him, with no jury and no chance for the accused to testify.

Jack's lawyers mounted the argument that would define Northern antislavery litigation for the next quarter century: that the 1793 Act was itself unconstitutional. The Fugitive Slave Clause, they contended, was a compact among the states, not a grant of legislative power to Congress. And a proceeding that stripped a person of liberty without a jury violated due process.

Jack lost. But in 1835, on appeal, Chancellor Reuben Walworth wrote an opinion that mattered far beyond the outcome: Congress, he concluded, had no constitutional authority to legislate on fugitive rendition at all, and could not commandeer state officers to enforce a federal claim. It was a state judge, in a slaveholder's victory, articulating the constitutional theory that would arm the free states.

The case is the quiet hinge of this story. Walworth's reasoning was cited in Prigg seven years later, and the principle that the federal government cannot compel state officials to enforce federal law — the doctrine underlying every Northern personal liberty law of the 1840s and 1850s — traces through this New York courtroom.

Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842)

41 U.S. (16 Peters) 539 → Full text at Cornell Legal Information Institute · Free full text

Margaret Morgan had been permitted to live as a free woman in Maryland for years. She moved to Pennsylvania, where she had a child — a child free under Pennsylvania law by birth on free soil. In 1837 Edward Prigg, acting for the family that claimed her, seized Morgan and her children and carried them into Maryland without obtaining the certificate Pennsylvania's 1826 personal liberty law required. Pennsylvania convicted him of kidnapping.

Justice Joseph Story's opinion for the Court struck down Pennsylvania's law. Federal power over fugitive rendition was exclusive and supreme; a state could not add procedural protections that burdened a slaveholder's claim. Story went further, endorsing a common-law "right of recaption" — the notion that an owner could seize an alleged fugitive anywhere, by his own hand, without any legal process whatsoever. For free Black Northerners, this was a license for kidnapping, and it was used as one.

Yet Story also held that enforcement was a federal duty alone, and that states were under no obligation to lend their courts, jails, or officers to it. His family later insisted he regarded the case as a "triumph of freedom" on exactly that ground.

The free states took the opening. Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and others passed statutes forbidding state officials to participate in rendition and closing state jails to it. Federal enforcement, deprived of local machinery, began to buckle — which is precisely why the South demanded, and got, the far more coercive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Prigg is the decision that made 1850 inevitable.

Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)

60 U.S. (19 Howard) 393 — argued 1856, decided March 6, 1857 → Full text at Cornell Legal Information Institute · Free full text

Dred Scott was taken by his enslaver from Missouri into Illinois, a free state, and then to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory, where the Missouri Compromise barred slavery. He returned to Missouri and sued for his freedom on the settled principle that residence on free soil conferred it.

Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion for a 7–2 Court did not merely reject the claim. It held that Black Americans, free or enslaved, were not and could never be citizens of the United States, and therefore could not sue in federal court at all. Taney wrote that at the founding they had been "regarded as beings of an inferior order" with "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." He then went beyond the case before him to declare the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional: Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Slavery, in effect, was national.

Justice Benjamin Curtis dissented and dismantled Taney's history, showing that free Black men had voted in five of the thirteen states at the time the Constitution was ratified, and had participated in its adoption. Curtis resigned from the Court within months. Justice John McLean also dissented.

For the antislavery movement the ruling was a rupture. Political abolitionism had rested on the premise that slavery could be contained, then strangled, by federal power over the territories. Taney foreclosed it. Within a year John Brown convened his Chatham convention and adopted a Provisional Constitution for a government of his own — a direct answer to a Court that had just declared he and his allies had no standing to petition it.

Ableman v. Booth (1859)

62 U.S. (21 Howard) 506 — decided March 7, 1859 → Full text at Cornell Legal Information Institute · Free full text

In March 1854 a crowd in Milwaukee broke into the federal jail and freed Joshua Glover, a man who had escaped slavery in Missouri and was being held for rendition. Sherman Booth, an abolitionist newspaper editor, was charged under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 with aiding the rescue.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court did something extraordinary: it issued a writ of habeas corpus, ordered Booth released from federal custody, and declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional. When federal authorities re-arrested him, the state court freed him again. The Wisconsin legislature passed resolutions invoking the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and asserting a state's right to nullify federal law.

A unanimous Supreme Court, Taney again writing, reversed. No state court possessed authority to release a prisoner held under federal process or to sit in judgment on the constitutionality of a federal statute. The supremacy of federal law and federal courts was absolute, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was valid.

The alignment is worth pausing on. Here a Northern free state invoked states' rights and nullification in defense of an abolitionist, and a Southern-dominated Court answered with an uncompromising assertion of federal supremacy. The usual sectional script ran backward, which reveals how thoroughly both doctrines were instruments rather than principles.

The decision came down on March 7, 1859. Seven months later Brown crossed the Potomac at Harpers Ferry. The last state-level legal shelter for those who resisted the Fugitive Slave Act had been swept away, and the message was not lost on him.