Prigg v. Pennsylvania

Impact

The impact of Prigg was mixed. Southerners were generally pleased with the outcome but complained that Justice Story’s opinion undermined enforcement of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, because Story said that northern judges could not be required to enforce the law. Most northerners, especially abolitionists, other opponents of slavery, and free blacks, were appalled by the decision. Northern opponents of slavery attacked the opinion for protecting slavery and failing to protect the liberties of free blacks. In Story’s home state of Massachusetts many of his colleagues were horrified by the opinion. John Quincy Adams spent a whole day reading all the opinions, saddened by the case and the fact the opinion had been written by someone from his own state. Abolitionists, predictably, denounced Story and the decision.

After Justice Story died, his son, who was himself antislavery, claimed that his father believed that the opinion was a “triumph of freedom” because it allowed northern states to refuse to participate in the return of fugitive slaves. However, there is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, it would have been utterly inconsistent for Story to have purposely undermined his opinion in that way. Moreover, there is other evidence to suggest that Story fully backed his opinion. Shortly after the case was decided, he wrote to Senator John M. Berrien of Georgia urging that he introduce legislation that would allow the federal courts to appoint commissioners to enforce any federal law that a state judge could enforce. Thus, if the state judges refused to hear cases under the 1793 law, the federal court commissioners could do so. Story naively believed such a law could be passed without even mentioning fugitive slaves.

Many northern judges and legislatures acted on Story’s single line suggesting that the states should enforce the federal law but could not be required to do so. Starting in 1843, a number of free states prohibited law enforcement and judicial officers from hearing fugitive slave cases and closed their jails to slave catchers. This led to increasing demands from the South for a new fugitive slave law, which was finally passed in 1850. That law adopted Story’s suggestion to authorize the appointment of federal commissioners in every state to enforce the law.

Justice McLean, who dissented from Story’s opinion, may also have been harmed by the case. In 1844 he was proposed as a presidential candidate by the Whig Party. However, southern Whigs blocked any consideration of him because, they argued, he was hostile to slavery. McLean very much wanted to be president, and his fidelity to liberty may have cost him dearly.

In the end, this case was a disaster for African Americans. It left all free blacks in the North vulnerable to kidnapping, with no chance that their state or local governments could interfere to protect them. It dramatically threatened the growing population of fugitive slaves in the North, who could now be seized without any warrant or legal procedure. It further allowed for cases of mistaken identity, because even if blacks were brought before a court, alleged fugitives could not get a trial to prove their freedom. The case underscored that the proslavery clauses of the Constitution of 1787 were in full flower in the 1840s.

The greatest cost of the decision was born by the free blacks of the North. They were now subject to capture and enslavement without any hope that local governments could protect them. Like Margaret Morgan and her children, they could be swept up by slave catchers, dragged to the South, and sold into lifetime bondage. When the dust from the case finally settled, Edward Prigg remained a free man, while Margaret Morgan and her children, including those born in the free state of Pennsylvania, remained slaves, sold into the Deep South, where they would toil away in anonymity, far from their family and friends.