Also, I note that you've had time to digest my point about Pennsylvania doing it in exactly the correct manner, while Massachusetts went the "penumbra" route. Is your silence on the point telling me you have no answer?
It would tell most people that I have other things to do during the day or maybe that I like to get some facts before responding, but most people aren't obsessives.
If this is about the Alabama thing, don't worry about it. Nobody presents themselves on line as they really are. For example, you may not believe it, but I am much handsomer and smarter here than I am in real life.
"On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
How would Tom Jefferson know better than people who were in Philadelphia in 1787 what the US Constitution meant? And who would know better than people who voted for the Massachusetts constitution what that constitution meant? It was the same voters and jurors who approved the state constitution and rejected slavery.
How could it be "obvious" when very similar language existed in the Declaration of Independence, and everyone in 1776 knew it was referring to white christian males, and not slaves?
See my post #218 to BroJoe. As strange as it might seem to 20th and 21st century Americans, the democratic age that Jefferson and Jackson brought in was more focused on the "white Christian male" thing than the 18th century deferential order that it replaced. In the Revolutionary War era, free Blacks who owned property could vote in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut (and possibly other states). Women property owners (necessarily single because married women could not own property) could vote in New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. When "universal suffrage" came in, property requirements were dropped and women and African-Americans lost the right to vote.
Here's the thing: people in government doubtless assumed that the people running things would look more or less like themselves, and voters probably thought the same way. But they weren't saying that only men or Whites could have the right to vote. Just as people who didn't "care deeply" about the slaves and didn't want to get involved in their lives could oppose slavery, people -- even down to our own day -- could assume without even really thinking about it that political leaders should more or less look like themselves without denying the vote or other basic rights to people who didn't.
18th century Americans like the Founders didn't envision what we have today, but neither did they believe as 19th century Americans did that all White men were a privileged class with rights that others didn't have simply by virtue of being White and male. Without resembling 21st century ideals, the age was more concerned with class and achievements than with the brute fact of race.
When 19th century men like Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis and Roger Tawney spoke about what the Declaration and Constitution meant they were talking more about their own generation than about the Founders. Of course the men who wrote and signed the Declaration didn't believe that slaves would be freed by what they wrote, but they weren't thinking primarily in racial terms and they were asserting a principle that was opposed to the institution -- if that principle was taken seriously and followed to its conclusion.
Why would it be "obvious" in the Massachusetts constitution, when this clearly wasn't "obvious" in the Declaration of Independence, from whence that verbiage was borrowed?
I should have said "logical conclusions," rather than "obvious conclusions" It wasn't obvious (i.e. clear to everyone at the time and universally undisputable) that ideas of freedom and equality applied to the slaves - but it was a sensible deduction from the premises of the Declaration and the state constitution. Geometric proofs aren't obvious to everybody, but they do follow logically and make sense once you understand them.
Of course, law and politics aren't geometry. People can still argue based on their different premises and assumptions, but emancipation was certainly a logical conclusion from the idea that men were free and equal, if not the only possible one.
The judges should have instructed the plaintiffs that the words of Article 1 were too abstract, and that unless such a purpose was clearly stated in unambiguous language, they should not be read in such a manner.
Your complaint was that the judges forced abolition on the people. Now apparently, it's that the judges didn't force their opinion on the jurors. Dismissing the case or directing a verdict would be an act of the sort of judicial high-handedness that you claim to abhor.
Did you note how the Abolition society then followed the proper approach of appealing to the legislature for a law accomplishing this?
Because the court rejected their case. "Proper" is your judgment. The abolitionists thought they had a winnable cause and that litigation was the proper move to make. They wouldn't have been doing their job if they didn't try different means of achieving their goal.
I am beginning to think you only have a veneer of objectivity, and in reality you, like BroJoeK, will simply dismiss things that don't fit within your world view. You want to believe what you want to believe, and you will not let unpleasant facts get in your way of believing it.
And you don't? That is very naive on your part. People make rational, evidence-based arguments against your obsessions all the time and they don't get through to you.
Of course, there is no pure objectivity. It's an ideal that can't be obtained, and nowadays it's not very popular even as an ideal. Even philosophers think that the "view from nowhere" may not have much to say about the world.
But there are more and less objective points of view, and if nobody's told you by now, you ought to realize that you're on the less objective end of the spectrum.
It's true that people do get so caught up in arguing things and taking a position that they ignore things that don't agree with the views they already have. But in this case, I don't think I'm avoiding anything.
You bring a lot of preconceived notions to this. For you, a Massachusetts court decision about slavery in 1782 has to be like the abortion or gay marriage decisions over a century later. The rest of us are seeing it for what it is, a unique event which peacefully abolished slavery without serious complaining or rebellion - a case in which things went terribly right for once.
If there had been a high-handed judge or mass outcry against the decision my view might be different, but sometimes (maybe very few times, but sometimes nonetheless) an important question can be resolved in the law courts - and better by a jury than by judges acting on their own.