JOSEPH STORY
ASSOCIATE JUSTICE, U.S. SUPREME COURT
Justice Story delivered the majority opinion
freeing the Amistad captives in March 1841.
JOSEPH STORY (1779-1845) Considered today "the foremost of American legal writers"
was born in Marblehead, Mass. Largely self-schooled, he entered Harvard in 1795,
and graduated in 1798, second in his class. After studying law with a Marblehead
attorney, he was admitted to the bar in 1801. His first wife, Mary Oliver, died with
in a year of their marriage in 1804. In 1808 he married Sarah Wetmore, daughter of
Judge William Wetmore.
Politically active from 1805 to 1811, he served in the state legislature, Congress,
and as Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He declined to run
for re-election to Congress in 1809 because "obedience to party projects required
too much sacrifice of opinion and feeling." At age 32, named to the Supreme
Court (1811) "he made it a rule to take no active part in politics," a
rule he abandoned in only two instances, occasioned by his animosity to slavery and
the slave trade, the first at a town meeting in Salem (1819) and the second in his
decision in the case of the ship La Jeune Eugenie, an alleged slave runner
(1822).
In the first instance, he spoke out against "any comparison that would extend
slavery into Missouri or any new states on the ground that it would violate the constitution
and the principles of our government" (Newmyer, 166). He also drafted the town
meeting resolution " 'condemning slavery as a moral and political evil' "
(Newmyer, 166). Three years later he voiced similar feelings concerning the La
Jeune Eugenie, that it had been seized on the suspicion of being an American
slaver. In his decision outlining the brutalities of the slave trade he held that
it was "repugnant to . . . the dictates of natural religion, the obligations
of good faith and morality, and the eternal maxims of social justice" (as quoted
in Newmyer, 347). Speaking more bluntly, he recognized that the slave trade was a
tissue of fraud, for the vessel was American built and its American title altered;
it was too much "to ask a court of justice to shut its eyes against what is
passing in the world, and to affect an ignorance of what every man knows" (as
quoted in Newmyer, 348).
However, much of Story's career focused on other matters such as appellate jurisdiction
of the Supreme Court over state courts, admiralty law, and constitutional law. He
almost single-handedly founded Harvard Law School in 1829, and from 1835-1845 published
twelve volumes of his Commentaries on wide ranging aspects of American law,
including three volumes on the constitution. this prodigious output eventually won
him an international reputation. He was also concerned with the whole fabric of American
education and harking back to his childhood in attending classes at Marblehead Academy
open to both girls and boys, he became "an active champion for the higher education
of women" (DAB, 107).
By 1841, in spite of everything he had achieved in codifying United States law, Story
faced a dilemma when the Supreme Court began its hearing of the Amistad case
in February, 1941. He had publicly made known his intense hatred of slavery, but
he also had a deeply held regard for the Constitution under which slavery existed,
and firmly believed that only through changes in the laws of the land and in gradual
emancipation could slavery be abolished, beliefs totally at variance with those of
the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who said that the Constitution "was
a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."
As the case unfolded, it became more and more apparent that the Africans had been
unlawfully transported to Cuba in violation of the Spanish law of 1817 forbidding
the slave traffic and that Ruiz and Montes, the supposed "owners" of the
Africans, knew this in fraudulently purchasing them.
Given this evidence a majority of the Court (three of whom were Southerners, including
Chief Justice Taney, himself a slaveholder) declared the Mendes free people. The
opinion, written by Story, may or may not have fully reflected the thinking of his
southern colleagues, but set forth his own views. In it he wrote that the Africans
were not pirates and were justified in seizing the Amistad for they had exercised
"the ultimate right of all human beings in extreme cases to resist oppression."
In the absence of positive law " 'the eternal principles of justice' had to
prevail" (Jones, 190-191). While story and his colleagues left untouched existing
law recognizing slaves as property and ignored John Quincy Adams's bitter attack
on executive interference on the part of President Van Buren, the decision had far
reaching implications, for it:
1) "ignored differences in color in affirming the black rights to to a fair
trial in America's courts
2) ruled that the Africans were free blacks, though of foreign nationality
3) recognized their status as persons having the right to participate in
the nation's legal process" (Jones, 193)
Calvin Lane
