As everyone knows, Cleveland is in the Western Reserve, that strip of northern Ohio once claimed by Connecticut.
Now, slavery was not completely abolished in Connecticut until the 1840s. One source states there were more slaves in Connecticut than in any other New England state at the time of the Revolution.
Connecticut, at the time a slave state, laid claim to the Western Reserve until 1800, at which time it ceded its claim to the federal government. The city of Cleveland had been in existence for four years at that point.
However, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the territory that would become Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin, had stated “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.”
Which law prevailed, the Northwest Ordinance or Connecticut state law? I know what the answer would be today, but states’ rights were perceived differently in 1800. Also, does it matter that the Northwest Ordinance was passed under the Articles of Confederation, which were superseded by the Constitution in 1789? Did the few federal laws under the Articles automatically roll over into the Constitutional era?
No, the decision only affirmed the law that slaves did not become free by moving into non-slave states. All free blacks stayed as free as they had been.
And for the OP, the Northwest Ordinance was the controlling law from my understanding. It was repassed by the modern Congress on August 7, 1789 And “The passage of the ordinance, which ceded all unsettled lands to the federal government and established the public domain, followed the relinquishing of all such claims over the territory by the states.”
Not that Ohio at that time was welcoming to blacks. Laws were passed as soon as Ohio became a state to restrict them and discourage them from moving there.
Did I say the Dred Scott decision made all blacks slaves?
After the decision I could move to Cleveland with my slave and he would stay my slave. Therefore slavery was legal in Cleveland (and everywhere else) after the Dred Scott decision.
Plus Dred Scott did not affirm any law as there was no law saying that slaves stayed slaves no matter where they moved. Instead it threw out any law that granted a slave their freedom if they moved to a free state so it ruled that part of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 as unconstitutional.
Yes, Dred Scott was pretty screwed up. Taney basically said that slavery was legal everywhere and always would be. He said the federal government didn’t have the power to abolish slavery in federal territory or any state. He said the states didn’t have the power to abolish slavery within their own state. He said that the original writers of the Constitution allowed slavery and no subsequent generation could abolish it. He said Congress and the President didn’t have the power to abolish slavery. And in the middle of the Supreme Court decision where he said all this, he said that the Supreme Court couldn’t rule on slavery and abolish it.
He didn’t try to overturn the Acts of Parliament that ended slavery in the British Empire but you could tell he was thinking about it.
It was very ambiguous. Congress included the land within the Northwest Territory, but Connecticut had never given up its claim to either sovereignty or ownership.
When white people actually began settling the Reserve, they naturally wanted the matter settled. Connecticut had little interest in actually governing the land, and never attempted to do so; they just wanted their title recognized so they could get the money from selling it. So that’s what happened in 1800–Connecticut got their money, the settlers who had bought from Connecticut got their title recognized, Connecticut ceded its claim to sovereignty, and the Northwest Territorial government was extended over the region.
So was slavery legal from 1797 to 1800? Yeah, maybe, kind of sort of. You would have been nuts to bring a slave there, though, given the uncertain future.
There are some completely false things being said about the Dred Scott decision. The Dred Scott decision did not address the power of a state to abolish slavery within its borders in any way, shape, or form. Slavery was quite illegal in Ohio in 1860.
And yet, as I understand it, a slave brought into Ohio was still a slave under Dred Scott, and always would be. She could be treated as a slave. Any children she bore would remain slaves.
So in what sense was slavery quite illegal. I can imagine they could outlaw the *transfer *of slaves within Ohio’s borders, but it seems that slavery was legal in every practical shape and form.
As Warner Wolf would say, “Let’s go to the video tape.”
From the syllabus.
[QUOTE=Scott v. Sanford, IV, 3-5]
Every citizen has a right to take with him into the Territory any article of property which the Constitution of the United States recognises as property.
The Constitution of the United States recognises slaves as property, and pledges the Federal Government to protect it. And Congress cannot exercise any more authority over property of that description than it may constitutionally exercise over property of any other kind.
The act of Congress, therefore, prohibiting a citizen of the United States from taking with him his slaves when he removes to the Territory in question to reside is an exercise of authority over private property which is not warranted by the Constitution, and the removal of the plaintiff by his owner to that Territory gave him no title to freedom.
[/QUOTE]
This says that Congress cannot bar slavery from federal territories but Ohio was a state and maybe there is a state sovereignty issue at play.
[QUOTE=Scott v. Sanford, V, 1-2]
The plaintiff himself acquired no title to freedom by being taken by his owner to Rock Island, in Illinois, and brought back to Missouri. This court has heretofore decided that the status or condition of a person of African descent depended on the laws of the State in which he resided.
It has been settled by the decisions of the highest court in Missouri that, by the laws of that State, a slave does not become entitled to his freedom where the owner takes him to reside in a State where slavery is not permitted and afterwards brings him back to Missouri.
[/QUOTE]
So now Taney delivers the Court’s opinion.
In deciding if Scott had standing, the question became that of if he was a citizen. Taney was not a racist and found slavery abhorent and in trying to reconcile his views with his legal theory, he decided on the “blame them not me” strategy.
But wait! There’s more. At that time a person in the US held two citizenships, that of their state and that of the US and in some ways they were independent. Having decided that Scott was not a citizen irregardless of if he were a slave or free*, the issue of state citizenship comes up.
I think that this was a legal fiction create by Taney to solve a paradox. If a slave were not a citizen but a free black was then the issue of his servitude condition would have to be ruled upon to see if he had standing to to sue. In other words, the courts would have to rule that Scott was free for him to have standing to sue to have the court declare that he was free.
For obvious reasons, a state cannot declare a state citizen to also be a citizen of the US. By extension one state cannot declare a person a citizen of another state.
So the problem is that once Scott was taken from Illinois back to Missouri, whether or not he was a free citizen of the sovereign State of Illinois was immaterial since he was not considered a citizen of the sovereign State of Missouri and could not avail himself of the courts there. But what if Scott had stayed in Illinois and Illinois consiere him a free citizen and opened the doors of the state courts there?
We have to wade through Taney’s treatise on the relationships of blacks and whites and citizenship to justify the decision he made. Then he comes to the crux of the matter: does going to a free state make you free? If not, then unsurprisingly you are still a slave.
Another rambling treatise then
So Congress cannot ban slavery in territories because property rights are protected and under the Constitution, slaves are property. Then comes an interesting series of statements.
This seems a little counterintuitive but it seems to say that even if Scott were free in Illinois that he was considered a slave in Missouri and so when he came back he was a slave under Missouri law. But that still doesn’t address his status while in Illinois and in fact, his status while in Illinois was moot once he went back to Missouri and never addressed by the court.
So I am actually going to change my answer to the OP. Since Ohio was a state before the Dred Scott decision, the fact that the Feds could not ban slavery in territories does not apply. Dred Scott was also before the 14th Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights at a state level and so the 5th Amendment does not apply. So I need to correct my history teachers but the Dred Scott decision did not allow slavery in free states. Cleveland was incorporated on 23 December 1814 so the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 does not apply (Ohio was already a state).
If that were true, there wouldn’t have been a Civil War. South Caroline seceded because Northern states had passed laws declaring any slave brought into them was automatically freed.
The laws covered a blind spot in the Dred Scott decision: Tawny had said that merely traveling to a free state did not automatically make a slave free, but did not prevent a state from passing a law that said so. In addition, if the law declared you free in Ohio, you could remain so if you remained in Ohio and didn’t go back to a slave state.
That’s from the 1787 Ordinance. I can’t find the text of the “slight modifications” supposedly made by Congress in 1789 but going with these words it’s hard to find wiggle room for Connecticut to apply its laws. Both times it was passed the Ordinance was considered to be a “compact” between the original states and the people in the territory.
The wording of Article 6 also sheds light on Dred Scott. An “escaped” slave is still a slave no matter the circumstances of the “escape” if the owner wanted to make the claim. Nor does a slave accompanying a master become free by stepping across a magical boundary line. But it was expected that anyone wanting to own slaves would do it in a slave state. You couldn’t pack up all your slaves, move to a free state, and continue practicing slavery. The territory and state of Ohio was always free.
From what I understand, the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery really referred to the buying or selling of slaves, not to owning slaves. The legal status of existing slaves in any state was not completely resolved until the 13th Amendment was enacted in 1865. Up to then you had state laws, the Dred Scott decision, and various wartime measures all conflicting with each other. The Dred Scott decision would seem to have settled the question but Lincoln simply ignored it.
So for the purposes of this thread, define slavery to mean the legality of buying or selling a human being.
To me it boils down to two questions, the answer to both of which must be yes in order to say slavery was at one time legal in Cleveland. (Note that Cleveland was a distinct settlement from 1796, before Ohio statehood, despite the fact that it was not incorporated until 1814.)
Did Connecticut state law permit the buying and selling of slaves in 1796? (The site I linked to in the OP is not clear but seems to imply yes.)
and
Did Connecticut state law prevail in the Western Reserve, the Northwest Ordinance notwithstanding, until Connecticut ceded its claim in 1800?
I don’t know of any case that tested the law, so imagine Jonathan Ambrose comes from New Haven to Cleveland with his young slave Joshua in 1798 and sells him to a passing ruffian who plans to take Joshua to Louisiana. Neighbor Justice Dogood gets wind of this and appeals to the local magistrate to prevent the sale. What happens?
Uh…no, South Carolina seceded because of Lincoln’s election. South Carolina did mention them in its list of grievances when it seceded, however.
Note that the strongest impetus for the passing of those Northern laws was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which offended many Northerners and was seen as an extension of power for slaveholders. At some point it becomes a chicken-and-egg debate about which side was first offended by the other’s sectionalism.
My imagination could produce any of a thousand answers and no one of them would have more validity than the others. That’s the problem with hypotheticals. You can have fun with them, but they provide no factual answers.
I’m not so sure about thisbeing explicit in the decision. Taney never addressed whether a slave in a free state became free because of the peculiar situation Dred Scott was in of having gone back to Missouri. Since under Missouri law Scott was a slave, he was a slave regardless of his status in Illinois and so the question of Scott’s status in Illinois was never addressed by the court as it had no bearing on the case.
Remember the 5th Amendment did not apply to states at the time so Taney’s arguement that property rights were protected only applied to territories (and I assume DC). My belief is that you are right, my only contention is that status in free state was never explicitly mention in his decision but is implicit in the legal theory he expouses. But then again would the Fugative Slave Clause apply in free states preventing a slave from being declared free? We just don’t know.
There were no local magistrates. That was the problem. Before local government could be organized, the jurisdictional problem had to be solved.
Congress solved it with the Quieting Act of April 28, 1800. By recognizing land titles granted by the state of Connecticut after 1787, the law effectively retroactively conceded that Connecticut had been sovereign in the Western Reserve until 1800. The power to grant land titles was the only form of sovereignty that Connecticut cared about.
Of course, the law never comes out and says anything that bold. One could equally well read it as saying, “We [the federal government] have been sovereign here all along, but we’re nice guys, so we’ll recognize Connecticut’s land titles.” The matter must remain theoretical and notional.
I think it’s an important point. If Scott was free when he was in Illinois then he was enslaved when he crossed back into Missouri. What was the basis for that enslavement? Under Illinois law, Scott was a free black man. Did that mean any free black man became a slave as soon as he entered Missouri?