FOOTNOTES:
[21] It is substantially conceded by the supreme court of Massachusetts, in delivering their opinion on the application of Sims for a writ of habeas corpus, that the Fugitive Slave law stands upon precedent alone, and is disowned by principle. Chief Justice Shaw says,—
“At the same time it may be proper to say, that if this argument, drawn from the constitution of the United States, were now first applied to the law of 1793, deriving no sanction from contemporaneous construction, judicial precedent, and the acquiescence of the general and state governments, the argument from the limitation of judicial power would be entitled to very grave consideration.”
I submit that the precedents, on this subject, both legislative and judicial, are substantially divested of all their force, by the fewness of the cases that have ever arisen under the law, by the general obsoleteness into which it fell, and, more than all, by that uniform indifference and neglect, and I may add inhumanity, with which colored people and the rights of colored people, have been almost universally regarded in the different states of the Union.
[22] Mr. George T. Curtis.
[23] I object to Mr. Curtis’s calling the county commissioners “the court of county commissioners.” They are nowhere so called in the act creating them, or in the act defining their duties. On the contrary, they are expressly contradistinguished from the “court of common pleas,” which is a court. This may have been an inadvertence, but it shows how he mistook the nature of their powers.