o deportation, but its actual
efforts confined to the dumping of free blacks, reprobates, and
castaways in some remote corner of the universe, for the convenience of
slave-holders themselves. [Footnote: 3 Schouler's United States, 198.]

[1839]

Meantime much was occurring to harden northern hostility to slavery into
resolute hatred, a fire which might smoulder long but could not die out.
The fugitive slave law for the rendition of runaways found in free
States operated cruelly at best, and was continually abused to kidnap
free blacks. The owner or his attorney or agent could seize a slave
anywhere on the soil of freedom, bring him before the magistrate of the
county, city, or town corporate in which the arrest was made, and prove
his ownership by testimony or by affidavit; and the certificate of such
magistrate that this had been done was a sufficient warrant for the
return of the poor wretch into bondage. Obstruction, rescue, or aid
toward escape was fined in the sum of five hundred dollars. This is the
pith of the fugitive slave act of 1793. It might have been far more
mischievous but for the interpretation put upon it in the celebrated
case of Prigg versus Pennsylvania.

Mr. Prigg was the agent of a Maryland slave-owner. He had in 1839
pursued a slave woman into Pennsylvania, and when refused her surrender
by the local magistrate carried her away by force. He was indicted in
Pennsylvania for kidnapping, an amicable lawsuit made up, and an appeal
taken to the United States Supreme Court. Here, in an opinion prepared
by Justice Story, the Pennsylvania statute under which the magistrate
had acted, providing a mode for the return of fugitives by state
authorities, was declared unconstitutional on the ground that only
Congress could legislate on the subject; but it was added that while a
free State had no right in any way to block the capture of a runaway, as
for example by ordering a jury trial to determine whether a seized
person had really been a slave, so as to protect free persons of dark
complexion, yet States might forbid their officers to aid in the
recovery of slaves. As the act of 1793 did not name any United States
officials for this service it became nearly inoperative. Spite of this
terrible construction of the Constitution, which Chief Justice Taney
thought should have included an assertion of a State's duty by
legislation to aid rendition, many northern States passed personal
liberty laws, besetting the