Only an affection born of long years of treatment in the main considerate and kind, could have furnished history with the spectacle of the espousal by the slave of his master's cause, in a conflict the end of which meant so much of difference to the two.
The four years of faithful devotion to which the women of the South bear willing witness could never have been exhibited by an enslaved people between whom and their masters the relations had been other than those we know to have existed.
The society which made possible those relations was unique in the history of civilization,—and in the annals of all the peoples who have passed through bondage the conduct of the negro slave stands without a parallel.
[FEDERAL COURTS, JUDGES, ATTORNEYS, AND MARSHALS IN MISSISSIPPI, 1798-1898.][96]
BY THOMAS McADORY OWEN.
The Mississippi Territory was created by Act approved April 7, 1798.[97] This Act, limited in its provisions, authorized the President "to establish therein a government in all respects similar to that now exercised in the territory northwest of the river Ohio," excepting expressly the prohibitive provision respecting slavery.
TERRITORIAL COURTS.
The Ordinance of July 13, 1787, regulating the government of the Northwest Territory, authorized the appointment by the President of "a court to consist of three judges," "who shall have a common law jurisdiction," their commission to continue in force during good behavior. The governor and the judges were given a limited law making power. On May 7, 1798, just one month after the act of formation, the President commissioned the Governor and Secretary, and two judges—Daniel Tilton and Peter Bryan Bruin. On June 28, 1798, the third, Wm. McGuire, was commissioned as Chief Justice. Their law making labors ended disastrously, the enactments being generally condemned by the people as "repugnant to the established principles of jurisprudence derived from the common law of England." So great was the clamor against them that Congress advanced the Territory into the second grade of government, May 10, 1800. These obnoxious laws were in a few years repealed.[98]
The settled portions of the Eastern section of the Territory (now Alabama) were so remote from the Mississippi settlements proper as to make the duty of holding courts there very burdensome, and often courts were not held at all. Superior Courts were held in the District of Washington (now Washington County, Ala.,) on the 4th Monday in Sept., 1802, by Seth Lewis, Chief Justice, and on the first Monday in May, 1804, by Judge David Ker, making two only in four years. Congress, therefore, on March 27, 1804, passed a law providing an additional judge for the Territory, to have jurisdiction in Washington District, and to this position Harry Toulmin was appointed.