on to bring
slaves into a Territory deprives any one of his property without due
process of law, bear examination.

It must be remembered that this restriction on the legislative power
is not peculiar to the Constitution of the United States; it was
borrowed from _Magna Charta_; was brought to America by our ancestors,
as part of their inherited liberties, and has existed in all the
States, usually in the very words of the great charter. It existed in
every political community in America in 1787, when the ordinance
prohibiting slavery north and west of the Ohio was passed.

And if a prohibition of slavery in a Territory in 1820 violated this
principle of _Magna Charta_, the ordinance of 1787 also violated it;
and what power had, I do not say the Congress of the Confederation
alone, but the Legislature of Virginia, or the Legislature of any or
all the States of the Confederacy, to consent to such a violation? The
people of the States had conferred no such power. I think I may at
least say, if the Congress did then violate _Magna Charta_ by the
ordinance, no one discovered that violation. Besides, if the
prohibition upon all persons, citizens as well as others, to bring
slaves into a Territory, and a declaration that if brought they shall
be free, deprives citizens of their property without due process of
law, what shall we say of the legislation of many of the slaveholding
States which have enacted the same prohibition? As early as October,
1778, a law was passed in Virginia, that thereafter no slave should be
imported into that Commonwealth by sea or by land, and that every
slave who should be imported should become free. A citizen of Virginia
purchased in Maryland a slave who belonged to another citizen of
Virginia, and removed with the slave to Virginia. The slave sued for
her freedom, and recovered it; as may be seen in Wilson _v._ Isabel,
(5 Call's R., 425.) See also Hunter _v._ Hulsher [Transcriber's Note:
Fulcher], (1 Leigh, 172;) and a similar law has been recognised as
valid in Maryland, in Stewart _v._ Oaks, (5 Har. and John., 107.) I am
not aware that such laws, though they exist in many States, were ever
supposed to be in conflict with the principle of _Magna Charta_
incorporated into the State Constitutions. It was certainly understood
by the Convention which framed the Constitution, and has been so
understood ever since, that, under the power to regulate commerce,
Congress could prohibit the importation o