Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Many people recognized the implications of Miln for questions of interstate migration and, in particular, for the movement of free African Americans. During arguments, one of the lawyers for New York, defending the passenger laws, cautioned that if the court decided that the commerce clause gave Congress exclusive jurisdiction over “the admission of passengers from Europe,” then the power to regulate “the arrival of passengers by land” would also fall under Congress’s authority. “If the one be exclusive [to Congress], the other is exclusive; and all vagrant laws, all poor laws, and police regulations, become, at once, solely of federal jurisdiction,” he warned. Among the state laws that would likely be invalidated were those that regulated the migration of free African Americans, as well as those that limited the entry of enslaved people transported in the interstate slave trade.