53
Watson v. Tarpley, 18 Howard, 521. This last fact would seem conclusively to show that the extent to which the courts of the United States will be bound by the decisions of the State courts, does not depend upon the question whether or not those decisions turned upon the construction of a statute of the State.
The determination of the personal status, or domestic and social condition of the inhabitants of a State, affects not only their contracts and relations towards each other, but their political rights and duties and their relation to the State itself; and would therefore seem to be, above all others, a subject over which the exclusive control of the State, except so far as expressly limited by the Constitution of the United States, is essential to the maintenance of the State government, and the preservation of harmony between it and the federal power. As was said by Chief Justice Marshall, in the first of the cases just cited, "the judicial department of every government is the rightful expositor of its law." And that this maxim extends to the determination of questions depending upon general principles of comity, and of the respect which, consistently with the policy of the State, may be allowed to the laws of other States, is sufficiently shown by the following statement of Judge Story, which has been approved by the supreme court of the United States: "It is not the comity of the courts, but the comity of the nation, which is administered and ascertained in the same way, and guided by the same reasoning, by which all other principles of the municipal law are ascertained and guided." Story on Conflict of Laws, § 38. Bank of Augusta v. Earle, 13 Peters, 589. These reasons apply with peculiar force to the question whether any inhabitant is a slave or citizen; and the Constitution of the United States, far from limiting the rights of the State in this respect, does not authorize any intermeddling by the national government with the relation of master and slave in the States, and, as we have seen, expressly leaves it to the several States to determine who shall be citizens. The same spirit has influenced the only two decisions of the supreme court of the United States upon this subject.
The first, which was decided in 1834 by the unanimous opinion of the court of that day, of whom Mr. Justice McLean is the only survivor, concerned the condition in Tennessee of children of a slave woman, born before the emancipation to which the mother would be entitled under her
