You misunderstood my question. In what sense could a State be said to prohibit slavery if a slaveowner could take up residence there for several years, with his slaves, then leave with them still in a stae of slavery?
This was the problem with Lincoln’s famous “house divided” speech. It expressed the view of northerners who thought the South was engaged in a conspiracy to force slavery on them in their own States, while southerners saw the wording as a threat to end slavery in southern States.
> In what sense could a State be said to prohibit slavery
> if a slaveowner could take up residence there for several
> years, with his slaves, then leave with them still in a
> stae of slavery?
Obviously they could prevent commercial transactions in slaves, they could (at the time) have made a lack of slaves a condition of the franchise, they could have ensured that slaves under their probate law could not be inherited and passed laws declaring that children born to slaves in their jurisdiction were free.
Those conditions would have guaranteed that slavery could never take hold in the free states except as a transitory abberation, wouldn’t they? And without having to declare that there were “different” property interests depending on whether the property in question was approved of by the federal government.
> It expressed the view of northerners who thought the
> South was engaged in a conspiracy to force slavery on
> them in their own States, while southerners saw the
> wording as a threat to end slavery in southern States.
Every other country in the Western hemisphere managed to eliminate slavery within 40 years of the end of the US civil war without coming to blows over the question. (I think Brazil was the last, right around 1900?) That distrust by each section of the intentions of the other may have been more of the real central issue than slavery, though slavery was the ignition point. What do you think?