In connection with these acts it would be interesting to review the earlier decisions of our Supreme Court,--as showing the spirit which actuated our judges when called upon to adjudicate in matters wherein the slave was involved, and the fairness and liberality displayed in the construction and application of the laws concerning him. But it is impossible in this brief paper to do more than glance at one or two. Among the very first decisions is one rendered in 1818, in which the learned judge held, in passing on an appeal for freedom from a number of negroes, claiming to be unlawfully detained as slaves, that the slaves in the Northwest Territory became free men by virtue of the ordinance of 1787, to which we have referred, and, with true justice, declared that, as such, they could "assert their freedom in the courts of this state and be protected therein." In the same opinion he observed that "slavery is condemned by reason and the laws of nature, and can only exist through municipal regulation; therefore in a matter of doubt, as between depriving an owner of a vested right, arising from law, and depriving a human being of his liberty, a natural right, the court would lean 'in favorem vitae et libertatis,'" and the petitioners were declared to be free. In another very old case we find it early judicially determined that, in this state, the unjustifiable killing of a slave was murder. This opinion, delivered in 1821, in the first years of our statehood, so clearly enunciates the humane principles which then actuated our courts, and to this good day continue to move them, in all their dealings with the inferior race, that it is peculiarly worthy of a place in the record of a society devoted to preserving the earlier history of our state and its people, and we may be pardoned for quoting its language at length.