Decision
Justice Mathias McGirk of the Missouri Supreme Court said that Stockton had "willfully procured a slave and held her, unlawfully, in free territories, an act punishable by forfeiture of the slave, as decreed by territorial law." With this ruling, he was supporting the laws of the neighboring free territories and states and closing a loophole by which Army officers had tried to argue they could keep slaves. Stockton had argued that he had no choice in his assignments with the Army, so should not have to lose his slave property as a result.
Rachel's success in this case gave her the basis to sue for freedom for her son James Henry. (Perhaps her attorney recommended that the cases be separated after she filed her initial petition above. This strategy was sometimes followed, perhaps so that juries did not worry too much about depriving a slaveholder of property all at once.) Rachel was successful in gaining freedom for her son; as he was born to a woman held illegally as a slave in a free state (and freed on those grounds), he was also free, according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, in which the child gained his social status from his mother.
Read more about this topic: Rachel V. Walker
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