F.S.A. Prigg v. Pennsylvania - 1842

In 1832, a black woman named Margaret Morgan moved to Pennsylvania from Maryland, where she had once been a slave to a man named John Ashmore. In Maryland, she had lived in virtual freedom but had never been formally emancipated.  Ashmore's heirs eventually decided to claim her as a slave and hired slavecatcher Edward Prigg to recover her.

On April 1, 1837, Prigg led an assault and abduction on Morgan in York County, Pennsylvania.  They took Morgan to Maryland, intending to sell her as a slave (her children, one of whom was born a free citizen in Pennsylvania, were also captured and sold). The four men involved in the abduction were arraigned under the 1826 act. Prigg pleaded not guilty and argued that he had been duly appointed by John Ashmore to arrest and return Morgan to her owner in Maryland.  However, in a ruling on May 22, 1839, the Court of Quarter Sessions of York County convicted him.

Prigg appealed to the US Supreme Court on the grounds that the Pennsylvania law was not able to supersede federal law or the US Constitution; the Fugitive Slave Act and Article IV of the Constitution were in conflict with the Pennsylvania law of 1788.  The case was Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U. S. 539 (1842).

Prigg and his lawyer argued that the 1788 and 1826 Pennsylvania laws were unconstitutional:

First, because of the injunction in Article IV of the US Constitution: "No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

Second, because the exercise of Federal legislation, such as that undertaken by Congress in passing the act of the February 12, 1793, supersedes any state law.

As a consequence, they argued, the 1788 Pennsylvania law, in all its provisions applicable to this case, should be voided. The question was whether Pennsylvania law violated the constitutional guarantee of fugitive slave return and the 1793 Act of Congress, passed to implement it.  


Decision

Writing for the Court, Justice Joseph Story reversed the conviction and held the Pennsylvania law was unconstitutional as a denial of both the right of slaveholders to recover their slaves under Article IV and the Federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which trumped the state law per the Supremacy Clause. Six justices wrote separate opinions.

Story ruled the Pennsylvania laws unconstitutional, but his opinion left the door open for further such actions by the state in his writing:

As to the authority so conferred upon state magistrates [to deal with runaway slaves], while a difference of opinion has existed, and may exist still on the point, in different states, whether state magistrates are bound to act under it; none is entertained by this Court that state magistrates may, if they choose, exercise that authority, unless prohibited by state legislation.

Impact

Story's phrase "unless prohibited by state legislation" became the impetus for a number of personal liberty laws enacted by Pennsylvania and other Northern states. The laws did as the Court had suggested and prohibited state officials from interfering with runaway slaves in any capacity. Runaways could not be caught or incarcerated, cases could not be heard, and no assistance could be offered to those wishing to recapture slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act still stood, but only federal agents could enforce it. This is known as the anti-commandeering doctrine.

Such an emphatic refusal to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act was viewed in the Southern states as a brazen violation of the federal compact. One letter to South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun stated that the new personal liberties laws "rendered slave property utterly insecure" and constituted a "flagrant violation of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution."

It was these laws that led to the Compromise of 1850: California could enter the Union as a free state, but the Northern states would have to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act within their own borders. In avoiding one crisis, the Court prepared the way for a greater one. By discouraging state cooperation in returning fugitives, the Prigg decision undercut the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and made the more brutal one of 1850 necessary.

The South had been forced to look to the federal government for a national solution, and the Court had pledged itself in advance to support such a solution, despite the fact that the North would certainly be mobilized against it. In addition, people began to believe that the Court was uniquely qualified to soothe the growing agitation over slavery.