Justice & Law Quote by Salmon P. Chase

Chase isn’t just arguing against slavery; he’s trying to disqualify it as a legal idea. The sentence is built like a courtroom trap: start with “the law of the Creator,” then dare any “interior law” to contradict it without exposing itself as fraud. By framing freedom as an “inalienable title,” he borrows the language of property and contract and turns it against the very system that treats people as property. It’s a deliberate rhetorical hijack: if enslavers insist the argument must be made in the vocabulary of ownership, Chase will use that vocabulary to prove ownership can never apply to a human being.

The phrase “cannot be repealed” is key. He’s not asking for benevolence or gradual reform; he’s claiming a hierarchy of authority in which divine or natural law sits above statutes and constitutions. “Interior law” reads as a jab at local, parochial power: state codes, court precedents, and economic custom dressed up as legitimacy. The subtext is a warning that legality isn’t the same thing as justice, and that a legal system can become a machine for laundering moral crime into paperwork.

Context matters: Chase emerged as a leading antislavery legal mind before the Civil War, defending fugitive slaves and helping build the political infrastructure that became the Republican Party. This line is designed for a nation pretending its founding ideals could coexist with human bondage. It forces the contradiction into the open: if “man is property” can stand, then the American creed of rights is just a slogan with an asterisk.