In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. JOHN F. TROW, ΤΟ MY FATHER, THIS WORK, THE RESULT O F STUDY ALWAYS PROMOTED BY HIS GENEROSITY AND INCITED BY HIS SYMPATHY, IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. PREFACE. ON the publication of a volume whose title indicates its connection with questions arising from the existence of negro slavery in the United States, a recollection of the number and variety of the existing works on that subject will suggest the propriety of some prefatory exposition of the author's point of view. Although the questions considered in this work are not frequently matters of controversy in courts of law, and derive their principal interest from their connection with objects of more political and public importance than are the litigated rights of private persons, yet it is designed and published as a legal or juristical treatise, or one which, if not technical, may still with strictness be called a "law book." It is intended to present statements of law only, without the introduction of any considerations of the effect of such law on the moral or religious, the social or political interests of the nation or of the several States. Having this character exclusively, it follows that the proposed work cannot be expected to contain any thing essentially new simply because, if such, it could not be law. The merit of a treatise of this kind must always consist in presenting no proposition without adequate reference or deduction, showing that the same has already been said, or, at least, if not said, has been implied in former juridical expositions. But the best known propositions, whether of fact or of doctrine, have not always been stated in their proper sequence, or exhibited as coherent or mutually dependent propositions. Whatever novelty may be found in the following pages will consist in the attempted arrangement of well-known facts, or received doctrines of law, connected with the subject, in their proper order; though, in doing this, it may be made to appear that some propositions which, in the discussion of the subject of slavery under the laws of the United States, are commonly advanced as contradictory or antagonistic, are, in reality, not so. If successful in being a correct statement of the law on the subject, the proposed treatise cannot be of a partisan character, or cannot be otherwise than impartial in respect to the objects of political parties. For the exposition of existing law is merely the statement of the fact, and is entirely distinct from any approval or disapproval of that law, on grounds of moral or political expediency. This will probably be admitted by all who have made the law to any great extent their study. But the popular manner of treating the subject of slavery may warrant the belief that a very large proportion of those who participate in such discussions would not admit the proposition, and do not ordinarily discriminate between the legal or juristical view of subjects of social interest and other views essentially ethical or political. The failure to distinguish between the science of law and that of ethics has been common in every country, and manifested in connection with many subjects of social interest; but never nor in any country more plainly than in this, at the present time, in controversy excited by the subject herein considered. The connection between private rights and public law, which everywhere exists, is particularly visible in the jurisprudence of republican states, and is in this country not merely a matter of |