| 4. This Act served the bases of a challenge to slavery in the District of Columbia in 1849 (District of Columbia law was based on Maryland law as a former part of Maryland.) In the case Drayton v. United States (Case No. 4074) Circuit Court, District of Columbia. Feb. 19, 1849 it was decided that it was not larceny under the 1737 Act to get slaves on board a ship with the promise of transportation into a free state. The judge declared the supremacy of Congressional law which had made the punishment imprisonment as opposed to the death sentence. The most important finding was that color is a prima facie evidence of slavery, but it is a presumption that could be overcome by proof to the countrary. Therefore, all blacks were to be supposed slaves unless they could prove otherwise. By 1849 the increasing nervousness of slave holders was apparent when the defense attorney read a section of speech from Senator Foote of Mississippi in which the senator had spoken of the French revolution as holding to man a bright promise of the universal establishment of civil and religious liberty, when the judge objected. The judge only stopped objecting when he saw that it was printed material. The Act of 1737 expected that the person charged with stealing was actually "gaining" something from the transaction. In this case there was no proof that Drayton was gaining anything by promising the slaves freedom. The Federal Cases Comprising Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit and District Courts of the United States, Book 7, St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1894, p. 1063. |
| Endnotes |
| Leonard Calvert Archives of Maryland |