Chester Arthur

Thanks to Jefferson, Chester Arthur defeated Virginia using the states' rights doctrine.

It is an extraordinary thing to look out across the decades and see the seeds one planted grow into such mighty oaks. When I sat at my desk in 1784 to draft that early ordinance for our western territories, my objective was clear. I wanted to ensure that as our young Republic expanded, the blight of human bondage would not expand with it. I proposed then that after the year 1800, slavery should be entirely prohibited in those new lands. That clause failed by a single, agonizing vote, a loss I lamented deeply, for it felt as though the fate of millions hung in the balance of a single man's absence. Yet, three years later, the Congress wisely revived that very spirit in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, forever sealing those northern lands against the institution of slavery.

To hear now that nearly eighty years later, a young attorney named Chester A. Arthur used that very framework to defend the helpless is profoundly moving. In November 1852, a family from my own beloved Virginia, the Lemmons, brought eight souls into New York en route to Texas. These individuals, Emmeline, Nancy, Lewis, Edward, Amanda, Mariah, Jane, and an unnamed infant, were held as domestic property. However, New York had exercised its own sovereign right to banish slavery completely. When Louis Napoleon and local abolitionists brought them before the court, the law stood firm. The moment those eight individuals voluntarily touched New York soil, their chains legally dissolved.

Yet, this courtroom victory was merely the beginning of their peril, as a legal decree of liberty did not automatically guarantee their physical safety. Even though Judge Paine had declared them free under New York law, the federal government had recently passed the aggressive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed slave catchers to operate openly in Northern cities and kidnap Black residents with impunity. Realizing that the Lemmon family would never be truly secure from recapture while remaining within the borders of the United States, the local abolitionist network immediately mobilized to spirit them away.

Knowing the grave dangers of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Underground Railroad acted swiftly to secure their safety. Led by a brave guide named Richard Johnson, they fled north across the border into Canada. They found refuge in North Buxton, Ontario, a self-sustaining community built by and for freed individuals. Safe under British law, which refused to recognize American slave codes, they claimed the permanent liberty denied to them in the American South, and their descendants live on in freedom to this day.

Mr. Arthur and his colleagues successfully weaponized my early legal philosophies regarding territorial freedom to win this case, and they defended it masterfully against Virginia’s appeals in 1860. In my view of our Constitution, a sovereign State must possess the absolute right to govern its own domestic affairs. Virginia was grievously wrong to attempt to turn a local institution into a national right of property, ignoring the principle that local sovereignty must dictate local laws. There is a profound, ultimate irony here, for my home state of Virginia spent decades loudly preaching the absolute supremacy of states' rights to protect their local institutions from federal overreach. Yet, in this courtroom, the pro-slavery establishment of Virginia entirely abandoned that doctrine, aggressively demanding that the federal government crush New York's sovereign right to exclude slavery from its own soil. Virginia lost its case precisely because New York successfully used the very principle of state sovereignty that Southern politicians had long claimed to cherish.

Yet, a most peculiar historical puzzle remains regarding Mr. Arthur. I am told that among all the men who have held the office of the Presidency, he is the solitary one who left behind no written word, speech, or letter offering praise to my name or my work. This absence was not born of political hatred, but of a fierce desire for personal privacy. Facing his own mortality in 1886, Mr. Arthur chose to burn three massive bins of his personal papers, legal briefs, and presidential records. He took his inner thoughts to the grave, reducing his legal drafts and private sentiments to ash. Though his bonfire ensured no written tribute to my work would survive his presidency, the triumph of the Lemmon case remains a lasting monument to how the principles of freedom we set down at the founding of this nation possess an enduring power to break the heaviest of chains.

Read what other US Presidents said about me: https://www.thomasjefferson.com/presidents