Thus wrote Mr. Stuart, after thorough research. A brief recital of the enactments of the Northern slaveholding States will show that his general representation is correct. We begin with Massachusetts. No law against slavery, (which had been long legally established in the colony,) was ever passed by her legislature;[69] and in that sense, the right to hold slaves may be said to have formally existed, until it was extinguished by her adoption of the "constitutional amendment," in 1866! Practically, slavery was gradually removed after 1780, by the current of the legal decisions against it, grounded upon a clause in the new bill of rights, adopted by the State in that year. This clause asserted, nearly in the words of the Declaration of Independence, the native equality and liberty of men. In 1781 a slave of N. Jennison, of Worcester County, recovered damages of his master for beating.[70] This decision, if sustained, of course implied the cessation of slavery. Although the Legislature of the State was moved in 1783, by this Jennison and others, to declare that slavery did not exist legally, so that the doubt might be ended, that body refused to act; nor did it ever after abolish slavery.[71] But judicial decisions after the example of the Jennison case were made from time to time, until, in 1796, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the case of Littleton _v._ Tuttle,[72] gave its countenance to the doctrine, that the bill of rights virtually made slavery illegal. That all this was a glaring instance of the judicial abuse, _ampliandi jurisdictionem_, is manifest from many facts: That the Massachusetts statesmen who adopted the same proposition in the Declaration of Independence, never dreamed of its possessing any force to abolish slavery in the United States which set it forth: That the convention which drew up the bill of rights for Massachusetts did not think of such an application; That this document declared "no part of any citizen's property could be taken from him without his own consent:" That slaves continued to be bought and sold, and advertised as before; And that the abolitionists, still in the minority, continued after 1780 to remonstrate against slavery as a sin still legalized. But such a mode of determining the question was well adapted to the meddlesome and crooked temper of that people. By this judicial trick the envious non-slaveholders were enabled to attack their richer slaveholding neighbours, and render them so uneasy as to insure their disposing of their slaves; while still there was neither law nor publick opinion prevalent enough to procure a legal act of emancipation. [Footnote 69: Moore, Slavery in Mass., p. 242.] [Footnote 70: Moore, Hist. of Slavery in Mass., p. 212.] [Footnote 71: Ibid., p. 216, etc.] [Footnote 72: Chief Justice Parsons, Mass. Rep., 4, Winchedon _v._ Hatfield.]