It could bar the creation of new slaves in Massachusetts. It could do nothing about those that were already legal.
If you were in Alabama, slavery would still be legal...in Alabama.
So long as Alabama had laws that held them in bondage, they would still be bound by the laws of Alabama even if they were in Massachusetts.
The only time that would come into play is if you brought your slave with you from Alabama to Boston.
Pretty much. But could a state ban you from coming? I don't see how if the larger covenant that was the constitution was to be respected.
Am I understanding this incorrectly?
I think you are in the ball park. I don't see any wiggle room in Article IV section 2. You could stop people from creating slaves in your state, but you couldn't stop slaves that were held in bondage by the laws of other states.
But the powers that be in states like Massachusetts behaved as if they could free slaves, and they got away with it because there was no effort on the part of the Feds to stop them from doing it. Like I said, it was a lot like this "sanctuary city" nonsense repealing Federal Immigration laws while the Feds just sit around and let them get away with it. (Same with legal marijuana.)
And if I lived in Alabama, I am pretty sure I would have to find a really good reason to go to Boston.
(However, back then a lot of the mills in Lawrence and Holyoke were using southern textiles.)
As much as Sessions thinks he can come into MA and ban pot, he has to realize that every other garden this year will have plants growing. We can have up to tweleve plants—that would give the average person is going to smoke in a few years.
DiogenesLamp #186: "It could bar the creation of new slaves in Massachusetts.
It could do nothing about those that were already legal."
For a long time now, DiogenesLamp has absurdly argued the insane position that not only was the Taney Supreme Court's 1857 Dred-Scott decision correct, it also reflected Founders' Original Intent, regardless of what they may have said or done in 1788.
Dred-Scott effectively ruled that Southern slave-holders could take their slaves permanently to any state, North, West or South, regardless of that state's abolition laws.
It meant, for example, that slave gangs could be brought North to work in Northern factories, taking jobs from free men.
Now, so far as I know, no historian or constitutional scholar supports DiogenesLamp's ideas, but it is important to note that Northern fears, in 1858 & 1860, that the Tanney / DiogenesLamp's interpretation might prove true contributed to the Republican party resurgence.
Republican voters wanted to tell the Taney Court: not just "no", but "h*ll no!".
Indeed the power of Republican Resistance convinced many Southerners that Fire Eaters were correct in saying they must secede to protect their "peculiar institution".
Anyway, DiogenesLamp's arguments here and elsewhere identify him as something we've seldom encountered, but should take note of: a self-loathing Northerner.