Viewing page 64 of 69

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

126

and ordinances, and the formal transactions of civilized states: and looking to these authorities, he found a difficulty in maintaining that the transaction was legally criminal."

In the Declaration of Independence the Laws of Nature are announced and appealed to as identical with the laws of nature's God, and as the foundation of all obligatory human laws. But here Sir William Scott proclaims a legal standard of morality, differing from, opposed to, and transcending the standard of nature and of nature's God. This legal standard of morality must, he says, in the administration of law, be held, by a Court, to supersede the laws of God, and justify, before the tribunals of man, the most atrocious of crimes in the eyes of God. With such a principle it is not surprising that Sir William Scott should have found a difficulty in maintaining that the African slave trade was legally criminal, nor that one half the Supreme Court of the United States should have adopted his conclusions. It is consolatory to the friends of human virtue and of human freedom to know, that this error of the first concoction, in the moral principle of a British judge, has been, so far as relates to the African slave trade, laid prostrate by the moral sense of his own country, which has overcome the difficulty of finding the slave trade criminal, by the legal and national abolition of slavery itself.

The decree of the Supreme Court, in 1825, "proceeding to give such decree as the Circuit Court ought to have given, did direct and order that the restitution to be made to the Spanish claimant should be according to the ratio which 93 (instead of 166) bears to the whole number, comprehending as well those originally on board the Antelope as those which were put on board that vessel by the captain of the Arraganta. After making the apportionment according to this ratio, and deducting from the number the rateable loss which must fall on the slaves, to which the Spanish claimants were originally entitled, the residue of the said 93 were to be delivered to the Spanish claimant, on the terms mentioned in the decree of the Circuit Court: and all the remaining Africans were to be delivered to the United States, to be disposed of according to law."

A mandate issued to the Circuit Court for the district of Georgia for the execution of this decree. One would suppose that the Supreme Court had sufficiently manifested its disapprobation of the mode of settling the question of freedom and slavery, by lot

127

and yet was their decree, on this point, not so explicit, but that one of the two judges of the Circuit Court believed that the selection between the Africans to be delivered to the Spanish claimants as slaves, and those claimed by the Portuguese Vice Consul, but whom the Supreme Court had declared free, might still be made by lot. The other judge understood better the spirit of the Supreme tribunal; and hence arose a difference of opinion between the two judges of the Circuit Court, which sent the case back for a second judgment of the appellate court. The second judgment of the Supreme Court, in the case of the Antelope, as rendered at their February term, 1826, and is reported (11 Wheaton, 413) as follows:--"Certificate.--A mandate having issued to the Circuit Court for the District of Georgia, to carry into execution the decree of this Court, pronounced at the February term, 1825, to deliver certain Africans, in the said decree mentioned, to the Spanish Consul for Spanish claimants; and the judges of that court having been divided in opinion respecting the mode of designating the said slaves to be delivered, and separating them from others to be delivered to the United States, whether the same should be made by lot, or upon proof on the part of the Spanish claimant, it is ordered to be certified to the said Circuit Court of Georgia, that, in executing the said mandate, the Africans to be delivered must be designated by proof made to the satisfaction of the Court."

To understand this difference of opinion, with regard to the mode of designating the Africans to be delivered up to the Spanish claimant and to slavery, it is to be remembered, that the libel of the Spanish Vice Consul before the District Court had claimed 150 of the Africans captured by Captain Jackson, and the libel of the Portuguese Vice Consul 130. That the decree of the District Court, founded on the report of the clerk, and awarded 142 of the 212 surviving Africans to the Portuguese, and 63 to the Spanish Vice Consul; while the subsequent decree of the Circuit Court, after a delay of one term and the admission of further evidence, had allotted in the ratio of 166 to the Spanish, and 130 to the Portuguese claimants. That is, deducting from the Spanish number the 16 persons drawn by lot and liberated, this decree gave to the Spanish and Portuguese Vice Consuls the ratio of the full number claimed by each of them in his respective libel. The Supreme Court, reversing this decree of the Circuit Court, had directed that the ratio of the whole number, to be delivered up to the Spanish