Prigg v. Pennsylvania

Context

Prigg v. Pennsylvania came to the U.S. Supreme Court as an appeal from a decision in Pennsylvania, where Edward Prigg, a citizen of Maryland, had been convicted of kidnapping a black woman named Margaret Morgan and her children. Prigg claimed that Morgan and her children were slaves in Maryland, owned by Margaret Ashmore, who was the mother-in-law of one of the other original defendants, Nathan Bemis. In 1837, Prigg, Bemis, and two other men traveled to Pennsylvania and seized Morgan and her children. They brought the group before Pennsylvania Justice of the Peace Thomas Henderson and asked for a certificate that would allow them to take the fugitive slaves back to Maryland. This was the proper procedure under an 1826 Pennsylvania personal liberty law designed to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks. Henderson refused to issue the certificate because he did not believe that Morgan was a slave. At this point Prigg and Bemis released Morgan and her children and then offered to take them home. Instead, Prigg and his companions took them all to Maryland, where they were eventually sold as slaves. A Pennsylvania grand jury indicted all four Maryland men for kidnapping. After two years of negotiations, Maryland agreed to return just one of them, Prigg, for trial. He was quickly convicted, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld this result. Prigg then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The facts of the case were complicated. Margaret Morgan was, in fact, the child of a slave woman, and under Maryland law that made her a slave as well. But shortly after the War of 1812, when she was just a child, her owner, John Ashmore, told Margaret’s parents that they were free. From that point on, Margaret always considered herself a free person. In the 1820s she married Jerry Morgan, who was born free in Pennsylvania. In the 1830 census Margaret, her children, and her husband were listed as “free persons of color” living in Harford County, Maryland. In 1832 the Morgans all moved to York, Pennsylvania, where they lived until 1837, when Prigg and Bemis claimed them as slaves. In Pennsylvania, Margaret gave birth to at least one child and perhaps two. Under Pennsylvania law they were free, even if Margaret was a fugitive slave.

The circumstances of this case illustrate the complexity of returning fugitive slaves. Most people imagine fugitive slaves to have been literally on the run, captured by hard-charging slave hunters in hot pursuit of African Americans seeking their freedom. Certainly there were cases like that. But often those claimed as fugitive slaves had lived in the North for months or years and had established themselves within a community. Even if Margaret Morgan was technically a fugitive slave, by 1837 she was also the wife of a free black citizen of Pennsylvania and the mother of one or two Pennsylvania-born free African American children. Returning her to bondage would affect more than just her life—it would directly affect her family and, indirectly, a whole community.

The return of fugitive slaves presented enormous legal, political, moral, and emotional controversies for the United States. By 1812 the nation had become truly divided into two sections. All of the northern states had either ended slavery or were doing so through gradual abolition acts. The small antislavery movements in the South that sprang up during the Revolution had all but disappeared. The nation had become, as Abraham Lincoln characterized it in his “House Divided” speech (1858), “half slave and half free.”

While slavery was dying out in the North, the free black population was growing. Many white northerners were uncomfortable with the presence of free blacks, and discrimination was significant. Still, almost all northerners disliked slavery, and most were appalled at the idea of holding people in bondage. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of northerners were opposed to seeing their free black neighbors kidnapped and sold as slaves. Many northerners felt the same way about fugitive slaves who were brave, lucky, and enterprising enough to escape from bondage and become free.

The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 provided that masters or their agents could bring an alleged slave before any state or federal judge and obtain a certificate of removal on the basis of an affidavit from the state where the person was allegedly a slave. There was no hearing into the status of the alleged slave, no jury trial, and no real opportunity for the person claimed to prove that he or she was actually free or that the wrong person had been seized. The law contemplated a summary process. In addition, the federal law provided no punishment for people who seized blacks and did not bring them before a judge or magistrate.

Starting in the 1790s there were persistent complaints from northern blacks and their white allies that southerners were roaming the streets of cities like Philadelphia and New York or scouring rural areas near Virginia and Maryland, kidnapping free blacks and hurrying them off to the South. There were also complaints that southerners were falsely claiming free people as fugitive slaves. Some of these people were free-born citizens of the northern states. Others were fugitive slaves who had recently escaped to the North. Some were like Margaret Morgan and her children, whose status was uncertain and murky. In response to kidnappings, starting in the 1820s the legislatures in a number of free states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, passed personal liberty laws to protect free blacks. These laws made it a crime to remove a black from the state without a judicial hearing by a state official. Thus Prigg was prosecuted under the Pennsylvania law after he removed Morgan and her children from the state without obtaining the proper papers from a state magistrate.

By the time Prigg’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, state judges in New York and New Jersey had held that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was unconstitutional. The New York courts believed that Congress had no power to pass the law and that the return of fugitive slaves was a matter left entirely to the states. In the case at hand, Jack v. Martin (1835), the New York court returned the slave Jack to his owner but did so under state law. In other words, New York accepted its constitutional obligation to return runaway slaves, but the state did not accept the idea that this should be done under federal law. In New Jersey the highly respected Chief Justice Joseph Hornblower questioned the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 in an unpublished opinion, complaining that it provided for a “summary and dangerous proceeding” and afforded “but little protection of security to the free colored man, who may be falsely claimed as a fugitive from labor.” Hornblower believed that even if the Congress had the power to pass the law, it was unconstitutional because it denied alleged fugitives due process and a jury trial.

Southerners complained that these laws made it impossible for them to recover their runaway slaves. They also argued that since Congress had passed a law on this subject, it was unfair to make them also comply with the rules set out by the different states. This argument was complicated by the fact that Prigg and Bemis had only partially followed the procedures set out under the 1793 law. They did bring Morgan before a judge, as the federal law required, but when he gave them a ruling they did not like, they took the law into their own hands and simply forced Morgan and her children to go to Maryland without any legal documents or the authorization of any court.

By 1841 slavery had become one of the most important and divisive issues in American politics. A small but growing abolitionist movement in the North was noisily calling for an end to slavery everywhere in the nation. The House of Representatives refused to even read antislavery petitions sent by abolitionists. More ominously for the South, northern politicians, such as New York’s Governor William H. Seward, Congressmen Joshua Giddings of Ohio, and Congressman (and former president) John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, were increasingly openly hostile to slavery. Southerners believed that they could never recover fugitive slaves, even though in the late 1830s there were famous cases in Maine and New York where masters did recover runaway slaves. It was in this context that Prigg’s case went to the Supreme Court.