Prigg v. Pennsylvania

Audience

Most Supreme Court opinions are directed at lawyers and judges. This one was not. All authors of opinions in this case clearly had a political audience in mind. Justice Story had two audiences: First, he wanted to reach southern leaders and politicians to reassure them that strengthening federal law to empower the national government would not harm slavery or threaten the South. On the contrary, the burden of his opinion was to show that the South would be protected by a strong national government. His second audience was the moderates in the North. He believed that they supported his goals of a stronger national government and stronger national Union. Thus, he wanted them to see that they should voluntarily cooperate with the return of fugitives. His plea to them was that the return of fugitive slaves was an essential bargain for the health of the nation and the success of the Constitution. In the end, he accepted (but not did explicitly state) that the loss of freedom for people like Margaret Morgan and her children was a small price to pay for a stronger Union and sectional harmony.

Chief Justice Taney was speaking to both the South and the North. His position was, of course, different from Story’s. He wanted to assure the South that he would fight for their needs to secure slavery at all costs and was, in effect, warning the North that it had to cooperate in the return of fugitive slaves. On the other side, Justice McLean was speaking for the North to the nation, reminding the Court and politicians that northerners were unwilling to allow the unsupervised seizure of their neighbors. The warning was ignored, which helped lead to the fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s, when significant and sometimes violent opposition to the return of fugitive slaves emerged.