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By Root 1661 0

what Mansfield actually said remains a matter of dispute. His ruling appears to have been a relatively cautious one, stating that the laws of England did not allow a master to use force to capture and remove from the country a slave who had escaped. Mansfield tried to rule in Somerset’s favor without freeing the thousands of other West Indian slaves present in England or asserting the general principle that slavery could not exist outside the jurisdiction that created it. But the Somerset decision took on a life of its own. The antislavery movement on both sides of the Atlantic seized on it as establishing the legal doctrine that slavery was “so odious” that whenever a person left a jurisdiction where local law recognized the institution, he automatically became free. The case came to be best remembered for a phrase used by Somerset’s attorney: the air of England was “too pure for a slave to breathe.” This idea, known as the Somerset principle or “freedom principle,” quickly passed into English common law. It established a sharp distinction between the property right in slaves, which enjoyed only local legitimacy, and other forms of property, universally recognized as such.24

As an Ohio lawyer, Chase strove to persuade the courts to adopt his outlook, without much success. He took so many cases defending blacks who had escaped from bondage that he became known as a kind of “attorney general for fugitive slaves.” In his 1837 defense of Matilda, who had accompanied her owner from Missouri and escaped in Cincinnati, and ten years later in Jones v. Van Zandt, a case involving an Ohio farmer fined for harboring nine fugitives, which Chase took all the way to the Supreme Court without a fee, he argued that despite the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, the moment an escapee entered a free state, he or she became free. Not surprisingly, Chase lost these cases. Matilda was returned to her owner and most likely sold at a slave market. Van Zandt paid his fine. Yet, as Charles Sumner, a young Massachusetts lawyer just embarking on a career in antislavery politics, commented about the Van Zandt ruling, Chase’s argument “will seriously influence the public mind.”25

In one legal context, the Somerset principle slowly came to be recognized in northern courts. This concerned the right of “transit”—that is, whether southern slaveholders had the right to bring their slaves into states that had abolished the institution. Until the 1830s, northern states generally recognized the right of transit, although some limited the amount of time an owner could keep a slave within their borders. Increasingly, however, northern courts began to deny that slave law reached into the free states. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts in 1836 declared free all slaves entering the state, except for those who were fugitives. Connecticut courts adopted the same principle the following year, as did New York’s legislature in 1841. Other states soon followed.26

In Illinois, the courts whittled away at the legal defenses of slavery, but very slowly. As late as 1843, the state supreme court explicitly affirmed the extraterritorial reach of the laws of slave states, noting that “thousands [of owners] from Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland,” and elsewhere had “sought and found free and safe passage with their slaves” across Illinois. At this point, Illinois accorded more recognition to the right of slave transit than any northern state except New Jersey. But the 1843 decision proved to be the last of its kind. Two years later, for the first time, the Illinois Supreme Court declared that no person born after the date of the Northwest Ordinance—that is, 1787—could be held as a slave in Illinois and that any slave brought into the state by his or her owner automatically became free.27

These victories arose from the determined efforts of a group of lawyers who risked public odium by defending fugitive slaves in court and challenging the long-standing system of black indentured servitude. John M. Palmer, Gustave Koerner, and Orville H. Browning, all future Republican