Who were Margaret Morgan and Edward Prigg?

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EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Margaret Morgan, born into slavery in Maryland, had been living with her husband and their children in the free state of Pennsylvania for five years when hired slave catchers led by Edward Prigg seized them one night in 1837, and hauled them away in “an open wagon in a cold sleety rain, with scarcely their ordinary clothes on.”

Their case was examined by the U.S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which said slavery was so fundamental to the nation’s formation that the rights of slave owners to “this species of property” could not be limited. The 1842 ruling is among the slavery law precedents directly cited more than 7,000 times in American jurisprudence, according to the Citing Slavery Project at Michigan State University.

A biography of Morgan by the Archives of Maryland states that her parents were owned by John Ashmore and likely were freed before her birth, since neither she nor her parents were listed as Ashmore’s property upon his death. She remained in the area and married Jerry Morgan, a free Black man. They moved to Pennsylvania in 1832, where they had another child.

Prigg had been hired by Margaret Ashmore, a woman claiming to be Morgan’s owner. Under the federal Fugitive Slave Act, he wasn’t required to prove it. Lacking the approval required by Pennsylvania law, he brought the family south across the Mason-Dixon line. He was convicted of state kidnapping charges in 1839. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, declaring Pennsylvania’s antislavery law unconstitutional.

Prigg and the other slave catchers let Jerry Morgan go that night as they took his family away. He later drowned in a river after a failed attempt to lobby the Pennsylvania governor for their freedom, according to the archives.

As for Margaret Morgan and her children, the archives say they may have been sold off by Margaret Ashmore — no subsequent record of them survives.