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"this is the most important decision every made by any Court in this country, and that it fortifies as by a wall of brass the rights of the slaveholder in the States and in the common territories. [...] The idea of the abolitionists, that a slave is free as soon as he touches the soil of a free State, is again exploded"

The Standard numbers the holdings one through six off the telegraphic dispatch and warns its own readers the summary "may not be strictly accurate." "every made" is the printed text, for "ever made." A Southern paper drawing the conclusion Northern editors most feared: the free states' soil no longer frees anyone.

Read it in the original — Weekly North Carolina Standard, Mar 11, 1857 ↗

"the great fact which it establishes -- the fact that Slavery is National; and that, until that remote period when different Judges, sitting in this same Court, shall reverse this wicked and false judgment, the Constitution of the United States is nothing better than the bulwark of inhumanity and oppression. [...] auctions of black men may be held in front of Faneuil Hall, and the slave-ship, protected by the guns of United States frigates, may land its dusky cargo at Plymouth Rock."

Greeley's Tribune had the largest circulation of any Republican paper in the country. The Faneuil Hall image is not rhetoric for its own sake: the Lemmon case, then working its way toward the same Court, asked whether a slaveholder could hold slaves in transit through New York. Everyone expected the Court to say yes.

Read it in the original — New-York Daily Tribune, Mar 11, 1857 ↗