The Constitution, Race, and Renewed Relevance of Original Intent: Reclaiming the Lost Opportunity of Federalism
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The Constitution, Race, and Renewed Relevance of Original Intent: ...

Chapter 1:  Constitutional Law and Slavery
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Such rulings, although determining relatively technical legal issues, had significant decisional consequences. Personal freedom could not be conferred by the state of refuge. So long as slavery endured, therefore, legal freedom could be secured only in rare and discretionary instances of manumission.

Fugitive-slave jurisprudence reflected an ordering of priorities akin to what influenced the Constitution itself. The original emphasis on the imperatives of establishing a union was reiterated in terms of maintaining intramural cooperation and thus the union’s continuing viability. Despite its formalistic appeal, such reasoning necessitated denial of practical realities. In Commonwealth v. Aves, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts thus related how it was

well known that when this Constitution was formed, some of the States permitted slavery and the slave-trade, and considered them highly essential to their interest, and that some other States had abolished slavery within their own limits, and from the principles deduced and policy evolved by them, might be presumed to desire to extend such abolition further. It was therefore manifestly the interest and the object of one party to this compact to enlarge, extend and secure, as far as possible, the rights and powers of the owners of slaves, within their own limits, as well as in other States, and of the other party to limit and restrain them. Under these circumstances the clause in question was agreed on and introduced into the constitution;…was intended to secure future peace and harmony…[and should be interpreted] to afford effectual security to the owners of slaves. The States have a plenary power to make all laws necessary for the regulation of slavery and the rights of the slave owners, while the slaves remain within their territorial limits; and it is only when they escape, without the consent of their owners, into other States, that they require the aid of other States, to enable them to regain their dominion over the fugitives.31

The Aves, decision diminished a free state’s legal interest in slaves, whether sojourning or seeking refuge, and indicated a constitutional duty to accommodate slavery. It thus highlighted the myth of federal neutrality and how slavery implicated the entire nation.In this regard, principles of federalism subtly but significantly had crept into a status of national policy.