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Massachusetts may with perfect propriety say to Virginia, No matter with what wrongs, for the purpose of sustaining a bloody and barbarous system, you outrage humanity in the persons of colored men born and reared upon your own soil, I demand of you by the sacred guaranty of your constitutional obligations, that the humblest of my citizens, when a sojourner in your territory, shall be secure in all the great fundamental rights of human nature. 

On the 22nd day of June, 1772, the Court of the King's Bench decided in the case of James Sommersett, claimed as a slave by a Virginia planter named Charles Steuart, that "the state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons moral or political, but only by positive law. It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law, and therefore the black must be discharged." Such, in that celebrated case, was the language of Lord Mansfield, the most brilliant light in the constellation of British Judges who made their land immortal and raised themselves to the most sublime moral elevation by stooping to lift the lowly and crushed of their fellow citizens and to place them upon the great table land of British security and protection. It was on the argument of the same case that counsellor Davy made the never-to-be-forgotten declaration that the air of England was "too pure for a slave to breathe in."

It is time for us to say the soil of Virginia, soaked by the blood of so many martyrs of freedom, is too sacred to be ever again pressed by the footstep of a slave. 

The Senator from Virginia, who, in 1850, excited the indignation of all christendom by demanding of Congress additional enactments to facilitate man and woman hunting through the length and breadth of the country, freely admitted that there was no positive law in Virginia establishing slavery, and that the system rested alone upon custom. He might have added, 

"It is a custom More honored in the breach than the observance."

How then can any one who respects the humane principles declared in Lord Mansfield's time-honored opinion for one moment regard slavery or any of its incidents as any legal force in this State?

The court will always be ready to apply Lord Mansfield's principles to slavery and its supports and incidents, and the law in question is nothing more, and it has also the strongest conviction that the State law excluding the testimony of colored men from the courts of justice is utterly null and void, because it is entirely repugnant to her glorious Declaration of Rights, which, following the decision of Lord Mansfield, was adopted in June, 1776, as part of the Constitution of the State. Never has that Declaration been repealed, but it has been repeatedly reaffirmed and continued as the basis of every State constitution of Virginia up to and including that of 1864.

Amount the provisions of that Declaration are the following:

1. "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society,
 
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