Note 125 — Chapter V · WAR AND FAMINE.

The minority of the Judges seem to have taken a less pedantic view, and one more in accordance with the policy of the Republic, which had always been one of compromise with regard to slavery. They held that it was not by Federal but State law that a negro was made property. They contended that neither the laws of nature nor of nations, nor the Constitution of the United States, recognised him as property, so that the rights of owners over this species of property must logically be limited to the Territory where, by municipal law, it was recognised as property.—See The Constitutional History of the United States, by Simon Stern, of the New York Bar (Cassell and Co.), p. 190.