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to be the resort, it is hoped that he will be authorized by law to have facts ascertained by the courts when, for his own information, he shall desire it."

So, on the other hand, whenever the duty of rendering justice to foreigners is imposed upon the Judiciary of the United States, whether by treaty or otherwise, it is to be presumed it will be as faithfully performed by that department without the intervention of the Executive as with it. And the judgement of the courts upon the rights of the parties to the record, must, as between those parties, be conclusive till reversed by some higher tribunal, to which they have liberty of appeal. 

In the present case there could be no necessity for the intervention of the Executive, since the claimants of the Africans appeared in person, - prayed the process of the court against them, and submitted themselves to its jurisdiction, as the treaty gave them a right to do. 

2d. But if the Government of the United States could appear in any case as the representative of foreigners claiming property in the Court of Admiralty, it has no right to appear in their behalf to aid them in the recovery of fugitive slaves, even when domiciled in the country from which they escaped: much less the recent victims of the African slave trade, who have sought an asylum in one of the free States of the Union, without any wrongful act on our part, or for which, as in the case of the Antelope, we are in way responsible. 

The recently imported Africans of the Amistad, if they were ever slaves, which is denied, were in the actual condition of freedom when they came within the jurisdictional limits of the State of New York. They came there without any wrongful act on the part of any officer or citizen of the United States. They were in a State where, not only no law existed to make them slaves, but where, by an express statute, all persons, except fugitives, &c., from a sister State, are declared to be free. They were under the protection of the laws of a State which, in the language of the Supreme Court in the case of Miln vs. the City of New York, 11 Peters, 139, "has the same undeniable and unlimited jurisdiction over all persons and things within its territorial limits, as any foreign nation, when that jurisdiction is not surrendered or restrained by the Constitution of the United States."

The American people have never imposed it as a duty on the Government of the United States to become actors in an attempt to reduce to slavery men found in a state of freedom, by giving extra-territorial force to a foreign slave law. Such a duty would not only be repugnant to the feelings of a large portion of the citizens of the United States,