They Were Free: The Clear Error at the Core of Prigg v. Pennsylvania

Abstract

The archives of the Historical Society of Harford County in Maryland contain the records of the 1837 freedom trial of Margaret Morgan, the central character in Prigg v. Pennsylvania. These documents reveal stunning evidence of the life of freedom lived by Margaret and her six children whose status as enslaved persons was simply assumed by Justice Joseph Story in his Prigg opinion, which nationalized slavery and established a federally protected right for slaveholders to recapture enslaved persons. This paper argues that based on the testimony presented by Margaret during her 1837 freedom trial in Harford County, even under the laws of Maryland, Margaret presented sufficient evidence for her and her six children, Lucy, Elizabeth, Hester, Amanda, Charles, and infant daughter, Margaret Ann, to be adjudged free. Consequently, the Maryland jury filled with slaveholders who concluded Margaret and her six children were all slaves committed clear error – a clear error that Justice Story later rubber stamped as the full story in Prigg v. Pennsylvania. By reviewing Margaret’s evidence proving that she and her six children were all free, the unconscionable reality that Prigg v. Pennsylvania was a fabricated test case is exposed. The reason that the evidence of Margaret’s life of freedom is sitting in the records of a Maryland historical society and never made it into the Supreme Court record is due to a series of sinister negotiations between the governments of Maryland and Pennsylvania that resulted in a special verdict stipulating as “fact” the falsehood that Margaret was a “slave for life.” In seeking to aggrandize federal power, Justice Story relied on this lie that Margaret was a “slave for life” to preempt state personal liberty laws, nationalize slavery, and subordinate the status of black Americans to a “species of property” subject to seizure and kidnapping into slavery on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.