Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Courtroom, and the Ambivalent Structure (Landmark Regulation Circumstances & American Society)

Margaret Morgan was born in freedom’s shadow. Her mother and father have been slaves of John Ashmore, a affluent Maryland mill proprietor who freed a lot of his slaves within the final years of his life. Ashmore by no means laid declare to Margaret, who ultimately married a free black man and moved to Pennsylvania. Then, John Ashmore’s widow despatched Edward Prigg to Pennsylvania to say Margaret as a runaway. Prigg seized Margaret and her youngsters—one in every of them born in Pennsylvania—and forcibly eliminated them to Maryland in violation of Pennsylvania regulation. Within the ensuing uproar, Prigg was indicted for kidnapping below Pennsylvania’s private liberty regulation. Maryland, nonetheless, blocked his extradition, setting the stage for a outstanding Supreme Courtroom case in 1842.

In
Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Courtroom thought of extra than simply the destiny of a single slavecatcher. The Courtroom’s majority struck down the free states’ private liberty legal guidelines and reaffirmed federal supremacy in figuring out the procedures for fugitive slave rendition. H. Robert Baker has written the primary and solely book-length therapy of this landmark case that grew to become a pivot level for antebellum politics and regulation some fifteen years earlier than Dred Scott.

Baker addresses the Structure’s ambivalence relating to slavery and freedom. At difficulty have been the attain of slaveholders’ property rights into the free states, the rights of free blacks, and the relative powers of the federal and state governments. By saying federal supremacy in regulating fugitive slave rendition, Prigg v. Pennsylvania was meant to bolster what slaveholders claimed as a constitutional proper. However the resolution solid into doubt the power of free states to outline freedom and to guard their free black populations from kidnapping.

Baker’s eye-opening account raises essential questions concerning the place of slavery within the Structure and the function of the courts in defending it in antebellum America. Greater than that, it demonstrates how judges trend conflicting constitutional interpretations from the identical sources of regulation. In the end, it gives an instructive have a look at how constitutional interpretation that claims to be devoted to impartial authorized rules and a definitive authentic that means is nonetheless freighted with up to date politics and morality.
Prigg v. Pennsylvania is a sobering lesson for these involved with at present’s controversial points, as states search to complement and preempt federal immigration regulation or to overturn
Roe v. Wade.