In this excerpt from a contemporary account of the arrest and trial of Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave from Virginia, Judge Edward Greely Loring decides in favor of Burns’s owner, Charles F. Suttle. At issue is the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and Loring quotes from Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Camillus Griffith (1823), another case involving a fugitive slave from Virginia.
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