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Show 204 DESPOTISM their exemption from a duty of ten p~r cent:., imposed, for the sustentation of the West Afncan forts, on all exports from that coast, "negroes excepted." 'l'he great object of the other act was, to make real estate in the colonies liable to be levied upon for debts the same with personal property; and as some of the colonies, to protect the planters against their crediton;, had declared negroes to be real estate, such negroes too were made by this act seizable for debt along with the lands to which they were attached. But so great an innovation upon the common law as the legalization of negro slavery, is not to be sustained by a mere statute implication; especially when the provisions relied upon do not necessarily imply any thing more than what the long-established common law had fully recognized. The importation into the colonies, and the sale there, of servants, to be held for a limited period·, to be esteemed during that period the goods and chattels of the purchaser, to be sold at his pleas· urt•, and liable if> rre seized for his debts, was un· doubtedly permitted by the law of England. Such servants were regularly imported from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, in numbers at least equal to the negroes; nor is there any thing more than this necessarily implied in the acts above cited. rrhere is nothing to show that parliament intended to place Africans in this respect on a diflCrent ground from other men. Such, indeed, would seem to have been the view taken of these acts by Lord Mansfield. 'l'he exportation of negroes was not limited to Amer~ ica. In the act above referred to for regulating the African trade, England was mentioned in precisely the same terms as the colonies, as one of the places to which African merchandise, including negroes, might be brought; and the holding of negroes in slavery, so far as that act goes, was just as much authorized by it in the one country as in the other. But thouah these statutes were cited in Somerset's case, Lord0 Mansficld allowed them no weight. And in the case of Forbes v. Cochrane, (2 Barnwell & Cress· IN Al\IERICA, 205 well, 443,) decided in 1824 in the Court of King's B_ench, Chief J_usticc Best expressly stated "that he dtd !'ot feel lumself fettered by any thing expressed 10 e1thcr of these acts, [the acts, that is, in relation to the trade with Afr.ica,J in pronouncina the same opinion on the rights growing out of slavc~y as if they had never passed." There is indeed a still further distinction as to the case of tho~e held as _slaves in the colonie~, apt to be overlooked m these duseussions, but which cannot be cli~rrgardcd, at least by those who coincide with Lords Camden and Chatham and the Continental Congresses of 1765 and 1774, in their views of colonial and metropolitan relations. Whatever ihe con~ dition might legally have been of those unfortunate aliens purchased jn Afdca as slaves, and brourrht to America and sold to the planters; suppose evc~1 that it might have b~en co.nsonant to English law to hold them as servants for hfe, as Blacl<otone seems to have imagined; yet the case was very different as to their children born in the colonies, who were in every respect, ~ccording to the views above slated, natural~ born subJects of the King of En~land, and entitled to all the rights of Englishmen, from which not even parliament itself, and much les& the colonial legislatures, had any power to exclude them. Such was the ground tal..:en by James Otis, in his famous pam1~hlet on Colmzial Rig!tts, published (1764) in antJmpatwn of the Stamp Act, and justly regarded as the first trumpet blast of the American Revolution· in which pamphlet he laid it down as a fundamental proposition, the basis of all his reasoning, that all the colom:sts, whether "black or white," born in America, were free born British subjects, entitled to all the esoential rights of such. The deci:sion jn Somerset's case is sometimes spoken of, even by judges on the bench, as having chan~ed the law of England. But such a view of it Is entirely false. Judgments of courts do not change the law. They arc not the law but only evidence of lS ' |