United States Supreme Court

United States Supreme Court.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16. – After the adjudgment of two minor cases, the argument was resumed in the case of Dred Scott vs. Sanford. H.S. Geyer for the claimant, to the broad ground that an African was incapable of being made a citizen. So it has been held  by the Courts in a number of cases, and at the time of the adoption of the Constitution every state except one slaveholding State held that he could not.

The convention for the adoption of the Constitution left open the African slave trade for twenty years. To his mind, it was not the intention of the framers of that instrument to make an importation of material for citizenship.

The law of Missouri says: If a negro come with naturalization papers from another State he shall not be whipped. The law don’t recognize him as a citizen. If a master carries a slave into a State where slavery does not exist, and the slave has not been discharged by the local law, and he takes him back to a State where slavery is established, the latter are not bound to enforce the law of the other State or exact the fortitude imposed. He denied that Judge Scott was the first to deny that a slave was emancipated by residence in a free State. It had been decided everywhere that the mere temporary residence of a master in a non-slaveholding State does not emancipate the slave. He referred to the Constitution of Illinois, which he understood was intended to interdict the Legislature from, by law, establishing slavery, and not to effect transitu slaves. In the case of Massachusetts vs. Ames, the slave was released by haebus corpus and not by the laws of the State. So in the case of Illinois, there was no physical, legal, moral compulsion against a slave passing through the State. He thought, when we examined the question, the precedents recognize the right of Congress to establish municipal governments in the Territories.

He denied that there had been any judicial decision allowing them to go beyond this. The remarkable fact that every attempt to legislate on slavery was not under the Constitution, but under the pretence of compact. The act of 1798 and others were not an exertion of power to inhibit slavery, but an exercise of commercial power. In fact, these very acts recognize the existence of slavery by local laws and protect it. He gave a history of the passage of the Missouri Compromise, which was only passed under the pressure of circumstances to enable the admission of Maine to take place. He thought the South, there being no time for discussion, surrendered it for the sake of peace, without considering the question on the ground of constitutionality.

Mr. Geyer entered into a long argument in favor of the doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty, stating that in it the people were resisting what they resisted in the Revolution: - the omnipotent power of legislation – and contending that nothing be found in the Constitutions, or decisions of the Supreme Court, conferring  supreme unlimited power over the Territories on Congress. He denied the people of the Territories the power to set up any government they please. So also was it incompetent for Congress to impose upon them any government. All the legislation of Congress must have reference to their admission on an equal with other States. Alluding to the fact that all the States assisting in forming the Constitution were slaveholding except one, he said that they having provided for a continuance of the slave trade for twenty years, it could not be that they intended to deprive a portion of the people of the use of the Territory obtained by the alms and money of all the people, or subject them to an arbitrary use of it. If Congress has omnipotent power over the Territories, there was nothing to prevent their making any man therein a slave. He could not suppose that such a thing ever entered the minds of the framers of the Constitution, jealous as they were of legislative power, and successfully as they resisted it. And they were not the men to enact upon this Continent, the oppressive power claimed by the Parliament of England. Adjourned.