Fugitive Slave Act Of 1850 - Fugitive Slave Act Definition

The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests 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 were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law. Abolitionists nicknamed it the "Bloodhound Law" for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves.

Background

By 1843, several hundred slaves a year were successfully escaping to the North, making slavery an unstable institution in the border states.

The earlier Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was a Federal law which was written with the intent to enforce Article 4, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, which required the return of runaway slaves. It sought to force the authorities in free states to return fugitive slaves to their masters.

Many Northern states wanted to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act. Some jurisdictions passed "personal liberty laws", mandating a jury trial before alleged fugitive slaves could be moved; others forbade the use of local jails or the assistance of state officials in the arrest or return of alleged fugitive slaves. In some cases, juries refused to convict individuals who had been indicted under the Federal law.

The Missouri Supreme Court routinely held with the laws of neighboring free states, that slaves who had been voluntarily transported by their owners into free states, with the intent of the masters' residing there permanently or indefinitely, gained their freedom as a result. The Fugitive Slave Law dealt with slaves who escaped to free states without their master's consent. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), that states did not have to offer aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves, greatly weakening the law of 1793.

After 1840, the black population of rural Cass County, Michigan, grew rapidly as families were attracted by white defiance of discriminatory laws, by numerous highly supportive Quakers, and by low-priced land. Free and runaway blacks found Cass County a haven. Their good fortune attracted the attention of southern slaveholders. In 1847 and 1849, planters from Bourbon and Boone counties in northern Kentucky led raids into Cass County to recapture runaway slaves. The raids failed but the situation contributed to Southern demands in 1850 for passage of the strengthened Fugitive Slave Act.

Southern politicians often exaggerated the number of escaped slaves and often blamed escapes on Northerners interfering with Southern property rights. Since there was no way to confirm the number of runaway slaves, Congress enacted stricter laws regarding fugitive slaves in the United States.

New law

In response to the weakening of the original fugitive slave act, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 penalized officials who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave, and made them liable to a fine of $1,000 (about $29,000 in present-day value). Law-enforcement officials everywhere were required to arrest people suspected of being a runaway slave on as little as a claimant's sworn testimony of ownership. The suspected slave could not ask for a jury trial or testify on his or her own behalf. In addition, any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to six months' imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Officers who captured a fugitive slave were entitled to a bonus or promotion for their work.

Slave owners needed only to supply an affidavit to a Federal marshal to capture an escaped slave. Since a suspected slave was not eligible for a trial, the law resulted in the kidnapping and conscription of free blacks into slavery, as suspected fugitive slaves had no rights in court and could not defend themselves against accusations.

The Act adversely affected the prospects of slave escape, particularly in states close to the North. One study finds 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.

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 U.S. Supreme Court overruled the state court.

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 in the South among 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 angry pro-slavery reactions to the Vermont law. Virginia governor John B. Floyd warned that nullification could push the South toward secession, while President Millard Fillmore threatened to use the army to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in Vermont. N o test events took place in Vermont, but the rhetoric of this flare-up echoed South Carolina's 1832 nullification crisis and Thomas Jefferson's 1798 Kentucky Resolutions.

"Jury nullification" occurred as local 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. He wanted high-profile convictions. The jury nullifications ruined his 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 his owner; the juries convicted none of the men. Webster sought to enforce a law that was extremely unpopular in the North, and his Whig Party passed him over again when they chose a presidential nominee in 1852.

Effects

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 own consciences and beliefs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) to highlight the evils of slavery.

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

I never would obey it. I had assisted thirty slaves to escape to Canada during the last month. If the authorities wanted anything of me, my residence was at 39 Onondaga Street. I would admit that and they could take me and lock me up in the Penitentiary on the hill; but if they did such a foolish thing as that I had friends enough on Onondaga County to level it to the ground before the next morning.

This was far from empty rhetoric. Several years before, in the Jerry Rescue, Syracuse abolitionists freed by force a fugitive slave who was to be sent back to the South; they successfully smuggled him to Canada. The case of Anthony Burns was an example of an unsuccessful attempt by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law using force to free a captured slave. Other famous examples include Shadrach Minkins in 1851 and Lucy Bagby in 1861, whose forcible return in 1861 has been cited by historians as important and "allegorical." Pittsburgh abolitionists organized groups whose purpose was the seizure and release of any slave passing through the city, as in the case of a free black servant of the Slaymaker family, erroneously "rescued" by black waiters in a hotel dining room.

Other opponents, such as African-American leader Harriet Tubman, simply treated the law as just another complication in their activities. One important consequence was that Canada became a major 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. In Pittsburgh, for example, during the September following the passage of the law, organized "squads" of escaped slaves set out for Canadaâ€"armed and sworn to "die rather than be taken back into slavery"â€"with more than 200 men leaving by the end of the month.

With the outbreak of the American Civil War, General Benjamin Butler justified refusing to return runaway slaves under this law because the Union and the Confederacy were at war: he confiscated the slaves as contraband of war and set them free, figuring that the loss of workers would also damage the Confederacy. As the war continued with little progress for the Union side, slavery came to be seen as an institution that needed to be undermined to weaken the Confederacy's economy. As such the US Congress eventually passed legislation that forbade US forces to return runaway slaves to their masters, and President Abraham Lincoln consolidated that shifting attitude towards slavery with the invocation of the Emancipation Proclamation that made the institution's destruction an official war goal. As such, the spirit and letter of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 were completely abandoned.