## Facts

- Jonathan and Juliet Lemmon, Virginia residents, traveled with eight enslaved people from Virginia to Texas via a route requiring a stop in New York City.
- The enslaved persons were removed from their vessel and kept overnight at a Manhattan boarding house while the Lemmons arranged onward travel.
- A New York resident, Louis Napoleon, petitioned for habeas corpus on the ground that New York law prohibited bringing enslaved persons into the state and declared such persons free.
- In response to the writ, the Lemmons claimed the individuals were enslaved “property,” were only temporarily present, and were in transit between slave states due to travel necessity rather than for residence or sale.
- A New York trial court ordered the eight discharged from the Lemmons’ custody; an intermediate appellate court affirmed; the Lemmons appealed to the New York Court of Appeals.

## Issues

1. Whether New York statutes abolishing slavery and prohibiting the introduction of enslaved persons freed individuals voluntarily brought into New York, even if only in transit between slave states.
2. Whether applying those statutes to nonresident slaveholders in transit violated Article IV privileges and immunities or principles of interstate comity.
3. Whether the statutes, as applied, were preempted or barred by the U.S. Constitution, including the Commerce Clause or the Fugitive Slave Clause.

## Decision

- The New York Court of Appeals affirmed, 5–3, and ordered the eight individuals discharged from custody.
- The court held that New York law rendered free any person held as a slave who was voluntarily brought into New York by the owner, even for a temporary stay incidental to travel.
- The court rejected constitutional objections grounded in privileges and immunities, interstate commerce, and the Fugitive Slave Clause, treating the matter as New York’s authority over personal status within its territory.
- A dissent would have recognized a transit-based comity or constitutional limit protecting the slaveholders’ claimed rights while passing through New York.

## Legal Principles

- A state may determine personal status within its borders under its municipal law; recognition of another state’s slave law is a matter of comity and yields to contrary state legislation.
- Under New York’s anti-slavery statutes, a person held as a slave who is introduced into New York by the owner’s voluntary act becomes free, regardless of the owner’s intent to remain only temporarily.
- The Privileges and Immunities Clause does not require a state that has abolished slavery to extend to nonresidents a right to hold persons as property where the state itself recognizes no such right.
- A state law declaring persons free upon voluntary introduction into the state is treated as a status determination, not a regulation of interstate commerce.
- The Fugitive Slave Clause applies to fugitives from service; it does not protect claims to enslaved persons voluntarily brought by the owner into a free state.

## Conclusion

The court held that New York could enforce its anti-slavery statutes to free enslaved persons voluntarily brought into the state during transit, and that this exercise of state authority over personal status did not violate federal constitutional provisions invoked by the slaveholders.


Lemmon v. The People, 20 N.Y. 562 (N.Y. 1860)