On June 27, 1839, the schooner La Amistad sailed from Havana for another port on the coast of Cuba. Aboard were its captain, two Spanish subjects named Ruiz and Montez, and fifty-three people whom they claimed as their slaves. During the voyage the captives rose, killed the captain and took the ship. Two years later the Supreme Court had to decide whether they were property or free people.
That question ran through American law for decades before the Civil War. This post looks at four decisions the Court issued between 1841 and 1859: one that freed the captives of the Amistad, two that backed the master's claim to a person who had escaped, and one that closed the federal courthouse door to Black Americans. Each one shows what the law allowed at the time and who it left without protection.
The Amistad captives are ruled free
United States v. The Amistad (1841), decided March 9, 1841. Lieutenant Gedney of the U.S. brig Washington found the schooner at anchor off Long Island on August 26, 1839 and brought it and the Africans into Connecticut. Several parties then went to court. Gedney's crew asked for salvage. Ruiz and Montez claimed the Africans as their slaves. The United States, acting on a request from the Spanish minister, asked the court to return the vessel, cargo and the people on board under its treaty with Spain. The Africans, including Cinque, answered that they were not slaves, and that they had been born free in Africa.
Justice Joseph Story wrote for the Court. He held that the treaty with Spain did not require their return, and that the Africans "ought to be deemed free." If they were "kidnapped, and free negroes," he wrote, the treaty could not bind them, and "the United States are bound to respect their rights as much as those of Spanish subjects." Where "human life and human liberty are in issue," the Court said, the dispute had to be settled on "the eternal principles of justice and international law." The Court affirmed the lower courts' decrees except for one part: the order that the Africans be delivered to the President to be sent to Africa. It reversed that part, because the Africans had never been imported into the United States as slaves. They had come in the ship they had seized, "asserting their freedom."
The decision was narrow. It turned on the facts of one voyage and on a treaty. It did not say that slavery was unlawful, and it did not touch the system that held millions of people in bondage.
The Constitution and the person who escaped
Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), decided March 1, 1842. Margaret Morgan was held as a slave in Maryland by Margaret Ashmore. In 1832 she escaped to Pennsylvania. Edward Prigg, acting as Ashmore's agent, took Morgan and her children from York County to Maryland. A Pennsylvania law of 1826 made it a felony to take a Black person out of the state in order to hold them as a slave. Prigg was indicted under it, and the Pennsylvania courts entered judgment against him.
Justice Story, again writing for the Court, reversed. He held that Pennsylvania's law was "unconstitutional and void," because it punished "the very act of seizing and removing a slave by his master, which the Constitution of the United States was designed to justify and uphold." The Court found the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 constitutional in its main provisions, and held that the power to legislate on the subject belonged to Congress alone, so that a state could not add its own rules.
The ruling had a second part that is easy to miss. The Court said that state magistrates "may, if they choose, exercise" the power the 1793 act gave them to help recapture people, unless a state law forbids it. It did not say that states had to help. Chief Justice Taney agreed that the Pennsylvania law was void but wrote separately because he did not "assent to all the principles" in the opinion, and Justices Thompson, Wayne and Daniel also wrote their own opinions.
Dred Scott and the meaning of "citizen"
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), decided March 6, 1857. Dred Scott, an enslaved man, brought a suit in a federal court. The question for the Supreme Court was whether he could sue there at all. Federal courts could hear that kind of case only between citizens of different states.
Chief Justice Taney wrote the opinion. The official summary of the decision records its main holding: "a free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States." Such a person, it said, was not "entitled to sue in that character in a court of the United States," so the Circuit Court never had jurisdiction. The summary adds that the only two clauses in the Constitution that mention this race "treat them as persons whom it was morally lawful to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves."
The ruling reached the descendants of people who had been brought to the country and sold as slaves, free or not.
Federal courts over state courts: Ableman v. Booth
Ableman v. Booth (1859), decided March 7, 1859. On March 11, 1854, in Milwaukee, Sherman Booth helped a man escape from a deputy marshal who held him under a warrant issued under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. A federal commissioner held Booth for trial. Booth asked a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the 1850 act was unconstitutional. The justice agreed and ordered him released. The full Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed. Booth was later convicted in the federal District Court on two counts, and he petitioned the Wisconsin court again, which issued new writs of habeas corpus.
Chief Justice Taney wrote for the Court that a state judge may issue a writ of habeas corpus and ask why someone is held, but once the return shows the person is in custody under the authority of the United States, the state judge has no power to go further. The nation, he said, has "two distinct and separate sovereignties within the same territorial space, each of them restricted in its powers." State courts cannot free prisoners held by federal officers. The Court also reached the merits and declared that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was, "in all of its provisions, fully authorized by the Constitution of the United States." It reversed the Wisconsin court's judgments.
The case is remembered as a statement about federal supremacy. Its practical result in 1859 was that Wisconsin's courts could not block a federal prosecution for helping someone escape slavery.
What came after
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, begins by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens of the United States and of the state where they live. That sentence answers the holding in Dred Scott that people of African descent could not be citizens. The Constitution was changed to overturn what the Court had said.
Why these cases still matter
Read together, the four decisions show a Court that, apart from the Amistad ruling, sided with the claim of ownership in three of the four cases. It did so in the ordinary language of jurisdiction, treaties and federal power, in written opinions that still read as careful. Careful reasoning did not make the results just. The Fourteenth Amendment shows how the country answered: by amending the text, not by asking the Court to reread it.
Sources
- United States v. The Amistad (1841), 40 U.S. 518. Opinion: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), 41 U.S. 539. Opinion: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), 60 U.S. 393. Official summary of the decision: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- Ableman v. Booth (1859), 62 U.S. 506. Opinion: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- Fourteenth Amendment, Constitution Annotated
Updated November 2026.
This post was rewritten with AI (Claude) and reviewed by an editor before publication.
