That African slavery was the universal law of the British colonial empire, is equally plain from the facts already given concerning the legalizing of the slave trade. The treaty of Utrecht secured to Britain a monopoly of that traffick. The Parliament chartered the African Company, with the right to trade in slaves to all the colonies. The Parliament then by statute threw the trade open to all British subjects. The Parliament, by express law, made the property in slaves held in the colonies subject of action in English courts. The Solicitor-General, with Chancellor after Chancellor, decided that residence in England did not emancipate the slave upon his return to his colonial home. The General Court of Massachusetts enacted the same rule, as did the Burgesses of Virginia, again and again; and were never disallowed therein by the king. Even so late as 1827, fifty-five years after the Somersett case, Lord Stowell decided, in the case of the slave Grace, from Antigua, that on her return to the colony, her condition as a slave for life was fully revived.[56] And in the correctness of this decision, we find Mr. Justice Story concurring.[57] [Footnote 56: 2d Haggard, p. 94.] [Footnote 57: Letter to Lord Stowell.] The argument then is, that at the American Revolution all the territory claimed by the thirteen colonies was, by the law of the Empire, and of nations, slaveholding territory. The colonies, in assuming their independence, brought away the rights and institutions which they had inherited as colonial parts of that empire; and whatever prescriptive right was not expressly changed by law, was universally held to survive, as of course. Hence all the territory of the American Union was slave territory; and the only mode by which any part became non-slaveholding, was by the exercise of State sovereignty enacting a _lex loci_, which was only operative within the bounds of the State itself.