By the laws of Connecticut, slaves may receive and hold property, and prosecute suits in their own name as plaintiffs: [This last was also the law of Virginia in 1795. See Tucker’s “Dissertation on Slavery,” p. 73.] There were also laws making marriage contracts legal, in certain contingencies, and punishing infringements of them, ["Reeve’s Law of Baron and Femme,” p. 340-1.] Each of the laws enumerated above, does, in principle, abolish slavery; and all of them together abolish it in fact. True, not as a whole, and at a stroke, nor all in one place; but in its parts, by piecemeal, at divers times and places; thus showing that the abolition of slavery is within the boundary of legislation.
5. THE COMPETENCY OF THE LAW-MAKING POWER TO ABOLISH SLAVERY, HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED BY ALL THE SLAVEHOLDING STATES, EITHER DIRECTLY OR BY IMPLICATION. Some States recognize it in their Constitutions, by giving the legislature power to emancipate such slaves as may “have rendered the state some distinguished service, “and others by express prohibitory restrictions. The Constitution of Mississippi, Arkansas, and other States, restrict the power of the legislature in this respect. Why this express prohibition, if the law-making power cannot abolish slavery? A stately farce, indeed, to construct a special clause, and with appropriate rites induct it into the Constitution, for the express purpose of restricting a nonentity!—to take from the law-making power what it never had, and what cannot pertain to it! The legislatures of those States have no power to abolish slavery, simply because their Constitutions have expressly taken away that power. The people of Arkansas, Mississippi, &c., well knew the competency of the law-making power to abolish slavery, and hence their zeal to restrict it.
The slaveholding States have recognised this power in their laws. The Virginia Legislature passed a law in 1786 to prevent the further importation of Slaves, of which the following is an extract: “And be it further enacted that every slave imported into this commonwealth contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act, shall upon such importation become free.” By a law of Virginia, passed Dec. 17, 1792, a slave brought into the state and kept there a year, was free. The Maryland Court of Appeals at the December term 1813 [case of Stewart vs. Oakes,] decided that a slave owned in Maryland, and sent by his master into Virginia to work at different periods, making one year in the whole, became free, being emancipated by the law of Virginia quoted above. North Carolina and Georgia in their acts of cession, transferring to the United States the territory now constituting the States of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, made it a condition of the grant, that the provisions of the ordinance of ’87, should be secured to