I. Introduction: The New Sensibilities: explain why slavery and the positive law that protects it results in a constitutional crisis---the rise of antislavery in the Western mind and the dual explanation: capitalism's insatiable demand for free labor, a labor that creates more surplus value, or profit, than slave labor; the modern world, human perfectibility, and a new humanitarianism; capitalism and progress as the precipitants of that new humanitarianism.

1. The Constitution: A Pact with the Devil--among some opponents of slavery, the constitution itself appeared a suspect legal charter, one that conflicted with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, Christianity as understood by some believers, and a higher law.

2. The Higher Law Concept: goes back to the ideas that circulated during the 17th century English revolution and the 18th century American and French revolutions.

3. Antiabolitionist Mobs and Civil Liberties: the trampling of free assembly, free speech, and even endangering life and limb.

4. Congress, the Right to Petition, and the U.S. Mails: antislavery petitions, mailing abolitionist literature to the slave states, Southern Congressmen and their northern doughface Democratic allies, especially in the White House (a note about John Quincy Adams).

III. Fugitive Slaves and the Law of Comity: what are the responsibilities of a free state to a slave state in the matter of returning runaways, i.e. fugitives? Common law principles (Somerset) in conflict with constitutional mandates and congressional initiatives (positive law)--What is comity? And what are its limits?

1. Prigg vs. Pennsylvania (1842): What are the principles under which Justice Story ruled the apprehension of fugitive slaves without conventional due process protection to be legal and legitimate? The Constitution, the congressional act of 1793, and the supremacy of the national state--What were the aspects of the ruling that gave hope to northern antislavery people and nettled Chief Justice Taney? The fact that states were under no obligation to use their legal offices to implement a federal law.

2. Personal Liberty Laws: two forms of reaction to Prigg v. PA in the north; mob action to liberate captured fugitives and to intimidate local courts, judges, and juries; the enactment of personal liberty laws. A note on the distinction that Judge Lemuel Shaw drew between the case of a fugitive slave that he condemned back to slavery and the slave girl that he liberated, as elucidated in Hall: common law (Somerset) vs. positive law (fugitive slave act)--what Shaw's distinction and principle implied for slaveowners and the future of their institution.

3. Territorial Expansion, Slavery, and Popular Sovereignty: the original Missouri Compromise of 1820 and what happened over the ensuing three decades--slavery's solidification at the south as a profitable and expanding economic institution and the intensification of antislavery in the north--the persistent struggle over fugitive slaves and how northern judges use the law; ambivalently as Hall suggests: where the law is unclear, they can cite common law principles and liberate slaves; where positive law remains on the books, many feel duty-bound to implement it--continued population movement west, economic vitality of slavery, and conflicts between federal law and northern popular and legal action--the result, a new compromise.

The Compromise of 1850 and Contested Legalities: banning the slave trade, or market, in D.C.; placing the future status of the territories acquired from Mexico, except California, in doubt; a new fugitive slave law that provides federal funding and power to enforce it: Hall on how northern judges don the mask of the law: e.g. a dissenter in the infamous Dred Scott case: "The law is our only guide. If convictions of what is right and wrong are to be substituted as a rule of action in disregard of the law, we shall soon be without law and without protection." Henry David Thoreau's retort to such principles: "The law will never make men free. It is men who have got to make the law free."

Southern dissatisfaction with the Compromise of 1850 and using old revolutionary principles to solve a problem--back to the future: the concept of popular sovereignty and positive law in re slavery as an institution--why worry about the issue in Washington, why enact national legislation? Let the people speak, let the people decide--Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854: what it does and what it precipitates? Bloody Kansas and Bleeding Sumner!

4. Dred Scott and the Future of Slavery: Roger Taney and the Supreme Court intervene to end controversy and conflict--what is Taney's solution to the dilemma posed by slavery and its standing at the law? Why, by Taney's own logic, should there have been no Supreme Court decision in the case? Scott lacks legal standing because he is not a citizen and hence the parties to the suit lack the diversity necessary to take their case to the highest court--and why by Taney's reasoning and rendition of history did Scott lack citizenship and standing? How does Taney try to settle the issue of slavery's place in the territories? The mask of the law and the slaveowners' right to take his personal property wherever he/she chooses and to feel secure in its protection--How and why does Taney's decision put the future of the Republic in peril?

IV. Conclusion: The Republic in Peril--in the north judges, as your documents book points out in an 1852 NY state case, still used common law principles to liberate slaves in transit, to which a dissenter on the bench responded, that such stripping of property from citizens was "wanton aggression", "mere propagandism," and "would be a valid cause of war." Eight years later, as a document in your book makes clear, South Carolina cited such northern disregard for the constitution and the law as a cause for it to leave the union.