John Macpherson Berrien

In 1820 a revenue cutter brought into Savannah a captured slaving vessel, the Antelope, with more than 280 Africans aboard. Spanish and Portuguese claimants said the people were their property, taken by pirates; the United States, under the act of 1819 against the slave trade, said they were free. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1825. Attorney General William Wirt and Francis Scott Key argued for the United States and the Africans’ freedom. Berrien, with Charles Jared Ingersoll, argued for the claimants.

Berrien told the Court that the slave trade “is not contrary to the positive law of nations; because there is no general compact inhibiting it,” and that “For more than twenty years this traffic was protected by your constitution.” Of the enslaved he said: “Paradoxical as it may appear, they constitute the very bond of your union.”

Chief Justice Marshall held that the trade, though “contrary to the law of nature,” was not forbidden by the law of nations. The Court reversed the award to the Portuguese claimant, cut the Spanish claim to a share based on 93 people rather than 166, and ordered the rest delivered to the United States. About 120 of the survivors were sent to Liberia in July 1827; about thirty, ruled the property of the Spanish claimants, went into slavery in Florida.

In the debate over slavery in the territories, Berrien spoke for two days. The printed speech runs 32 pages. Four passages bear on the boards.

He closes (page 32) by recalling that he was “brought up at the feet of one who had perilled life and fortune in the achievement of our liberties,” his father, Major Berrien, and that “Beneath the soil of Georgia, the ashes of my parents and of my children repose.”

The Senate took the Fugitive Slave Bill through a series of recorded votes on August 19, 22, and 23, 1850. Berrien’s name is recorded in each. He voted no on every amendment to give a person seized as a fugitive a jury trial or a writ of habeas corpus, and no on amendments to limit the act to escapes between states, to confine hearings to judges, and to make marshals liable if a person escaped custody. On August 23 he voted yes on ordering the bill engrossed for its third reading, 27 to 12. The bill passed the Senate on Monday, August 26, without a recorded vote, so the engrossment vote of the 23rd is the vote historians cite. That is why Board 3 says he “voted to advance” the act rather than “voted for” it.

The Berrien House, 322 to 324 East Broughton Street at Habersham Street, Savannah, was built for Major John Berrien about 1791, according to the Georgia Historical Society marker. John Macpherson Berrien lived there from 1822 until his death in the house on January 1, 1856. Condemned three times and listed as a Georgia Trust “Place in Peril” in 2008, it was bought and restored between 2012 and 2016 by a descendant, Andrew Berrien Jones, with the 1917 raising for ground-floor shops reversed; the Georgia Trust gave it an Excellence in Rehabilitation award in 2020. Sources disagree on the construction date (about 1791, about 1794, about 1810).

The plantation. Berrien’s papers at the University of North Carolina include the accounts of a rice plantation and a farm near Savannah and Clarksville, and name some of the people he held: Prudence, bought in 1805; Phoebe, Charlotte, and Summer, in a will of 1798. The federal census slave schedule of 1850 for District 13 of Chatham County lists more than a hundred people under his name, each as a line with an age, a sex, and a colour, and no name. We count 142 lines across three pages; the figure 143 is also cited. The three pages are in the archive.