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

by Kate Masur

The Ohio court, in an opinion written by Judge John McLean, dispensed with the complexities of Carneal’s will and estate and decided that Lunsford was a free man. McLean, who would later sit on the US Supreme Court and author a dissent in the 1857 Dred Scott case, offered a moral condemnation of slavery and drew a stark distinction between the laws of Ohio and Kentucky. In Kentucky and other slave states, he wrote, “A presumption may perhaps arise, that every black man is a slave unless the contrary appear.” In Ohio, he said, “The presumption is different. Every man is supposed to be free, until his obligation to servitude is clearly shown.” Lunsford was entitled to the presumption that he was free, and he could only be held in bondage if the Kentuckians could affirmatively prove their “right in his own person.” The claimants had no such right, McLean and the other judges decided. Lunsford was entitled to his freedom because he had worked in Ohio, where slaveowners were not permitted to command labor from enslaved people. To permit people to work as slaves in Ohio, McLean argued, was “an evasion of the policy of the [state] constitution” that could “never be sanctioned.”