While their intentions were honorable, how is any of that constitutionally legal?
If a legislature can tell a slave owner how he must conform to the legislature's wishes as to how he should treat or move his slaves, then why don't they just tell him he can't have any in the first place?
What I'm saying is that if they can legally put conditions on it, then by the same principle, and by the same authority, they can legally ban it.
I think there is a dichotomy of principle between the opinions of the legislature and the mandates of the US Constitution. I think they are going beyond their legal authority, but as we have discovered innumerable times by subsequent court decisions, Law often only means what the Judge thinks about something.
What I'm saying is that if they can legally put conditions on it, then by the same principle, and by the same authority, they can legally ban it.
In essence the 1780 Act did ban slavery. The only slaves recognized were those then existing as slaves of residents, and when they died off, there would never be any more. It was an orderly process. The Act did not presume to encroach on ownership of wagons, et al.
Another thing to remember is that the supreme Court had yet to find the full force of it's self-anointed eminence. That would come later when the supreme Court turned into The Supremely Eminent Tribunal (under Taney, the former Attorney General under President Andrew Jackson).
To reiterate from a previous post, a very key point implied by Article IV was the recognition that there were slave-states and there were free-states and that they needed to recognize each other's rights.