e course of the common law."

I suggest that the common law is referred to as fixing a right simply.
The course of the common law is a phrase defined for more than two
hundred years, in Latin, in English, and in Norman French. It means
the formula of proceeding. I understood the Senator from Virginia [Mr.
MASON] to say that it had been decided in several of the courts that
an action of trover could not be brought for a negro slave in England.
I think I am familiar with the case. It is reported in Salkeld's
Reports, Lord Raymond's Reports, and in the Modern Reports--the same
case reported three times; but the same court which decided that
trover would not lie, because trover included the idea of property in
the man himself, in the same opinion said that trespass on the case
would lie for the loss of the service; so that it was all a question
of pleading, and no question of right at all. It is within my
recollection--and I believe the case was brought to the Supreme Court
on a writ of error, and can be found in Howard's Reports--that a
citizen of Kentucky declared in trespass on the case for taking away
his slaves, and added two counts in trover. What is trover but an
action of trespass on the case? Nothing more; and it never was any
thing more. The measure of damages is the same in both actions--the
value of the service of the servant; and yet that controversy on mere
pleading--which, in nine-tenths of the States of this Union, has
ceased to be of any value, because they have a code of procedure, is
made a terrific objection here.

Now, sir, I have never read the code of New Mexico, and I do not
propose to read it; but it is perfectly understood that that
Territorial Legislature, pursuing the privilege, if you call it
privilege, conferred by the compromise measures of 1850, has
established the relation of master and slave, or master and servant,
as perfectly as it is established in any of the fifteen so-called
slaveholding States. I do not admire this word "_status_" which we
find in the report of the Peace Conference; but as to the meaning of
that word, I cannot be in any doubt. It does not refer to any persons
in particular; it refers to a legal relation of servitude as between
master and servant, and it provides that that relation, or condition,
or _status_, shall not be changed; that for all wrongs or
controversies arising out of that there shall be a remedy through the
Federal judiciary.

I can see why the commi