Prigg v. Pennsylvania

About the Author

There are three authors of the opinions reprinted here: Joseph Story, Roger B. Taney, and John McLean. Joseph Story was born in 1779 and raised in a solidly middle-class family in Marblehead, Massachusetts (outside Boston). A hard-working and brilliant student, he graduated second in his class from Harvard University in 1798, at the age of nineteen. He then became a lawyer, held local offices, and served in Congress in 1808–1809. On November 15, 1811, President James Madison nominated him to the Supreme Court. He remained on the Court until his death on September 10, 1845.

Story was learned, scholarly, and a firm believer in a strong Supreme Court. He was Chief Justice John Marshall’s closest ally on the Court. A northerner, Story personally opposed slavery and, in his early years, issued a number of opinions and charges to grand juries that supported a strict suppression of the illegal African slave trade. In 1820 he made a speech opposing the spread of slavery into the western territories. In addition to his Supreme Court duties, Story was a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of more than a dozen books and treatises on law. His most important was Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833), a three-volume treatise that argued for a highly nationalist interpretation of the Constitution and rejected notions of states’ rights. His decision in Prigg was consistent with these values because it nationalized the return of fugitive slaves and rejected the idea that the states could regulate this issue. It was totally at odds, however, with his opposition to slavery and deeply inconsistent with the values of most New Englanders, the section of the nation he represented on the Court.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was born in 1777 into a wealthy slaveholding planter family in Maryland. He graduated from Dickinson College in 1795 at age eighteen, practiced law, and served in the state legislature. He was initially a Federalist, but in the 1820s he became an avid supporter of Andrew Jackson. He served as Jackson’s attorney general and secretary of the Treasury before becoming chief justice of the United States in 1836. As a young man, Taney had freed most of his own slaves and once defended a minister accused of giving antislavery sermons. However, while serving as Jackson’s attorney general, he argued that free blacks were not entitled to passports because they could never be considered citizens of the United States. By the early 1840s he was committed to supporting slavery, even if he did not own slaves. In 1857 he would write the opinion of the Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford, holding that free blacks had no rights under the Constitution and could never be considered citizens of the nation. Taney was far more sympathetic to states’ rights than Story and less supportive of a strong national government. His opinion in Prigg was inconsistent with these legal principles, since he rejected the idea that states should be able to protect their free black citizens in fugitive slave cases. However, his opinion in Prigg was consistent with his strong support for slavery. He died in 1864.

John McLean was born in 1785 in New Jersey but grew up on a small farm on the Ohio frontier. He had no formal education until age sixteen and never attended college. He edited a newspaper, practiced law, and then held a series of political offices, serving in Congress, on the Ohio Supreme Court, as commissioner of the General Land Office, and then as postmaster general under three successive presidents: James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. Even his opponents believed that McLean was the most competent and honest postmaster of his age. Shortly after he took office, President Jackson appointed McLean to the Supreme Court, where he served for thirty-two years, making him the twelfth-longest-serving justice in the first two and a quarter centuries of the Court’s history. He died in 1861.

McLean was always antislavery and, as Ohio justice, wrote a strong opinion holding that any slave voluntarily brought into the state was free. Later in life he became related through marriage to Salmon P. Chase, the most important antislavery lawyer in the nation, who was nicknamed “the Attorney General for Fugitive Slaves.” At the time McLean was on the Court, justices were required to “ride circuit,” where they presided over federal court trials in the states of the circuit to which they were assigned. McLean, riding circuit in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, heard more fugitive slave cases than any other justice. He took seriously his obligation to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. However, he also believed in protecting the rights of free blacks and preventing the enslavement of anyone unless there was an absolutely clear legal right to send that person into bondage. His opinion in Prigg is consistent with these views and with his vast experience with fugitive slave cases, which far exceeded the combined experience of Taney and Story.