Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

thumb|upright|An April 24, 1851 poster warning the "colored people of Boston" about policemen acting as slave catchers

The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was a statute passed by the 31st United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern interests in slavery and Northern Free-Soilers.

The Act was one of the most controversial elements of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a slave power conspiracy. It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slave-owner and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate. The Act contributed to the growing polarization of the country over the issue of slavery. It was one of the factors that led to the founding of the Republican Party and the start of the American Civil War.

Background

By 1843, several hundred enslaved people per year escaped to the North successfully, making slavery an unstable institution in the border states.

The Missouri Supreme Court routinely held that enslaved people who had been relocated into neighboring free states along with their enslavers gained their freedom as a result. The 1793 act dealt with slaves who escaped to free states without their enslavers' consent. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) that states were not required to aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves, significantly weakening the law of 1793.

After 1840, the Black population of Cass County, Michigan, proliferated as families were attracted by White defiance of discriminatory laws, by numerous highly supportive Quakers, and by low-priced land. Free and escaping Blacks found Cass County a haven. Their good fortune attracted the attention of Southern slavers. In 1847 and 1849, planters from Bourbon and Boone Counties, Kentucky, led raids into Cass County to recapture escaped slaves. The attacks failed, but the situation contributed to Southern demands in 1850 to pass a strengthened fugitive-slave act.

Southern politicians often exaggerated the number of people escaping enslavement, blaming the escapes on Northern abolitionists, whom they believed to be inciting their allegedly happy slaves and interfering with Southern property rights. According to the Columbus Enquirer of 1850, the support from Northerners for fugitive slaves caused more ill will between the North and the South than did all the other causes combined.

New law

thumb|left|Print by E. W. Clay, an artist who published many proslavery cartoons, supports the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the cartoon, a Southerner mocks a Northerner who claims his goods, several bolts of fabric, have been stolen. "They are fugitives from you, are they?" asks the slaver. Adopting the rhetoric of abolitionists, he continues, "As to the law of the land, I have a higher law of my own, and possession is nine points in the law."

In response to the weakening of the original Fugitive Slave Act, Democratic senator James M. Mason of Virginia drafted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which penalized officials who did not arrest fugitive slaves and made them liable to a fine of $1,000 (). Law-enforcement officials everywhere were required to arrest suspected escaped slaves on as little as a claimant's sworn testimony of ownership. was declared irrelevant. The commissioners before whom the alleged fugitive slaves were brought for a hearing (no jury was permitted, and the alleged slaves could not testify) were compensated $10 () if the subject was proven to be a fugitive and only $5 () if he determined the proof to be insufficient. In addition, any person aiding a fugitive by providing food or shelter was subject to as long as six months of imprisonment and a fine as high as $1,000. Officers who captured fugitive slaves were entitled to bonuses or promotions for their work.

Enslavers needed only to supply an affidavit to a federal marshal to capture a fugitive from slavery. Since a suspected enslaved person was not eligible for a trial, the law resulted in the kidnapping and conscription of free Blacks into slavery, as purported fugitive slaves had no rights in court and could not defend themselves against accusations.

James Oakes writes that "there was no statute of limitations. African Americans who had built families and worked as free people in the North for decades were vulnerable to re-enslavement at any time."

The act adversely affected the prospects of escape from slavery, particularly in states close to the North. One study found that while slave prices rose across the South in the years after 1850, it appears that "the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act increased prices in border states by 15% to 30% more than in states further south", illustrating how the act altered the chance of successful escape.

According to abolitionist John Brown, even in the supposedly safe refuge of Springfield, Massachusetts, "some of them are so alarmed that they tell me that they cannot sleep on account of either them or their wives and children. I can only say I think I have been enabled to do something to revive their broken spirits. I want all my family to imagine themselves in the same dreadful condition."

Judicial nullification

In 1855, the Wisconsin Supreme Court became the only state high court to declare the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional as a result of a case involving fugitive slave Joshua Glover and Sherman Booth, who led efforts that thwarted Glover's recapture. In 1859 in Ableman v. Booth, the Supreme Court of the United States overruled the state court.

Jury nullification occurred as Northern juries acquitted men accused of violating the law. Secretary of State Daniel Webster was a key supporter of the law, as expressed in his famous "Seventh of March" speech, who wanted high-profile convictions. The jury nullifications ruined Webster's presidential aspirations and his last-ditch efforts to find a compromise between North and South. Webster led the prosecution against men accused of rescuing Shadrach Minkins in 1851 from Boston officials who intended to return Minkins to slavery; the juries convicted none of the men. Webster sought to enforce a law that was extremely unpopular in the North, and his Whig Party rejected him again when it chose a presidential nominee in 1852.

Legislative nullification

In November 1850, the Vermont legislature passed the Habeas Corpus Law, requiring Vermont judicial and law enforcement officials to assist captured fugitive slaves. It also established a state judicial process, parallel to the federal process, for people accused of being fugitive slaves. This law rendered the federal Fugitive Slave Act effectively unenforceable in Vermont and caused a storm of controversy nationally. It was considered a nullification of federal law, a concept popular among slave states that wanted to nullify other aspects of federal law, and was part of highly charged debates over slavery. Noted poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier had called for such laws, and the Whittier controversy heightened pro-slavery reactions to the Vermont law. Virginia governor John B. Floyd warned that nullification could push the South toward secession. At the same time, President Millard Fillmore threatened to use the army to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in Vermont. No test events took place in Vermont, but the rhetoric of the incident echoed South Carolina's 1832 nullification crisis and Thomas Jefferson's 1798 Kentucky Resolutions.

In February 1855, the Michigan legislature passed a law prohibiting county jails from being used to detain recaptured slaves, directing county prosecutors to defend recaptured slaves and entitling recaptured slaves to habeas corpus and trial by jury. Other states to pass personal liberty laws include Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Resistance in the North and other consequences

The Fugitive Slave Law brought the issue home to anti-slavery citizens in the North, as it made them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery. "Where before many in the North had little or no opinions or feelings on slavery, this law seemed to demand their direct assent to the practice of human bondage, and it galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery." Moderate abolitionists were faced with the immediate choice of defying what they believed to be an unjust law or breaking with their consciences and beliefs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in response to the law.

Many abolitionists openly defied the law. Reverend Luther Lee, pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Syracuse, New York, wrote in 1855:

Several years before, in the Jerry Rescue, Syracuse abolitionists freed by force a fugitive slave who was to be sent back to the South and successfully smuggled him to Canada. Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns were both captured fugitives who were part of unsuccessful attempts by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law to use force to free them. Other famous examples include Shadrach Minkins in 1851 and Lucy Bagby in 1861, whose forcible return has been cited by historians as important and "allegorical". Pittsburgh abolitionists organized groups whose purpose was the seizure and release of any enslaved person passing through the city, as in the case of a free Black servant of the Slaymaker family, erroneously the subject of a rescue by Black waiters in a hotel dining room. Other opponents, such as African-American leader Harriet Tubman, treated the law as just another complication in their activities.

In April 1859, a putative freeman named Daniel Webster was arrested in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, alleged to be Daniel Dangerfield, an escaped slave from Loudoun County, Virginia. At a hearing in Philadelphia, federal commissioner J. Cooke Longstreth ordered Webster's release, arguing the claimants had not proved that he was Dangerfield. Webster promptly left for Canada.

Canada

One important consequence was that Canada, not the Northern free states, became the foremost destination for escaped slaves. The Black population of Canada increased from 40,000 to 60,000 between 1850 and 1860, and many reached freedom by the Underground Railroad. Notable Black publishers, such as Henry Bibb and Mary Ann Shadd, created publications encouraging emigration to Canada. By 1855, an estimated 3,500 people among Canada's Black population were fugitives from American slavery. General Benjamin Butler and some other Union generals, however, refused to recapture fugitives under the law because the Union and the Confederacy were at war. He confiscated enslaved people as contraband of war and set them free, with the justification that the loss of labor would also damage the Confederacy. Lincoln allowed Butler to continue his policy but countermanded broader directives issued by other Union commanders that freed all enslaved people in places under their control. Union Army forces sometimes returned fugitives from slavery to enslavers until March 1862, when Congress enacted the Confiscation Act of 1862, Section 10 of which barred Union officers from returning slaves to their owners on pain of dismissal from the service. the Fugitive Slave Act was only formally repealed in June 1864.

Escape of Shadrach Minkins, February 1851, Boston
Reenslavement of Thomas Sims, April 1851, Boston
Christiana Riot, September 1851, Christiana, Pennsylvania
Jerry Rescue, October 1851, Syracuse, New York
Escape of Joshua Glover, March 1854, Milwaukee
Reenslavement of Anthony Burns, May/June 1854, Boston
Attempted reenslavement of Jane Johnson, July 1855, Philadelphia
Oberlin–Wellington Rescue, September 1858, Oberlin and Wellington, Ohio
Escape of Charles Nalle, November 1860, Troy, New York

References

Sources

"Fugitive Slave Law" (2008)

External links

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as enacted (9 Stat. 462) in the US Statutes at Large
S. 23 on Congress.gov
Compromise of 1850 and related resources at the Library of Congress
"Slavery in Massachusetts" by Henry David Thoreau
Runaway Slaves a Primary Source Adventure featuring fugitive slave advertisements from the 1850s, hosted by The Portal to Texas History
Serialized version of Uncle Tom's Cabin in The National Era by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center