Fugitive Slave Laws
in American history, acts granting slaveholders special or additional facilities for the recovery of escaped slaves. A fugitive slave law enacted by Congress in 1793 depended for its execution on state courts and state officials. It was never effective, and a supreme court decision robbed it of half its force. The underground railway system, described elsewhere, ran off slaves with system and dispatch. Not less than 5,000 persons were engaged in aiding slaves to escape. Between 1830 and 1860 it is thought that no less than 60,000 slaves escaped, a "property loss" of possibly $2,000,000 a year. The courts of the Northern States very early refused to aid the pursuer or punish the aider. With public sentiment rising high in favor of the runaway slave, the Northern courts were slow to enforce the undoubted provisions of law for the return of fugitives.
To allay Southern resentment and hold the Union together, Henry Clay, senator from Kentucky, brought forward a plan of settlement in 1849 which proposed the admission of California as a free state, the establishment of territorial government in New Mexico and Utah without reference to slavery, the abolition of the slave trade, but not of slavery, in the District of Columbia, and lastly, a new and stringent fugitive slave law. After a famous debate the proposed measures were referred to a committee of thirteen. The committee reported the "Omnibus Bill," a bill forbidding the sale of slaves in the District of Columbia, and a third bill providing for the capture and return of fugitive slaves. All three bills were passed and became laws in 1850. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850:
1. Provided that United State commissioners might give a colored man or woman into the custody of any person who claimed the negro as a runaway slave.
2. Provided that the negro might not be heard in his own behalf, being held incapable of giving testimony.
3. "Commanded" all good citizens, when summoned, to aid in the capture of the slave and his delivery to the lawful owner.
4. Prescribed penalty of fine and imprisonment for those who harbored fugitive slaves or put an obstacle in the way of recapture.
In other words, the new act placed the entire machinery of the national courts at the disposal of the slave owner and required all citizens not merely to refrain from opposing the capture of a runaway, but to take hold and aid and assist in the negro's recapture and safe custody if called upon to do so. Under the provisions of this act negroes who had lived in the North in security, as they supposed, for many years, even men who were supporting families in a self-respecting way, were hunted down by "slave catchers"--"man hunters"--and were dragged into the United States courts to be remanded into slavery. It was not an edifying spectacle to see a marshal of the United States leading an inoffensive colored person through the streets of a Northern city. Riots followed, and more than one fugitive was rescued from the clutches of the law. In the case of Shadrach, a negro brought before the United States commissioner in Boston in 1851, a bystander wrote, "We heard a shout from the courthouse continued into a yell of triumph, and, in an instant after, down the steps came two huge negroes bearing the prisoner between them with his clothes half torn off, . . . and they went off toward Cambridge, like a black squall, the crowd driving along with them and cheering as they went."
Public feeling ran so high that nearly all the Northern States passed "personal liberty laws," interfering with the operation of the national law. In many parts of the North it became about all a manhunter's life was worth to be caught. The Fugitive Slave Law was practically nullified. Mrs. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin and events drove on at high speed toward the Civil War. Schoolboys who read of the Nullification Act of South Carolina should understand that nullification was not altogether a Southern doctrine, nor altogether a Southern practice.
As a matter of history, it is well to know that, in demanding the return of their slaves, the Southern slave owners were acting quite within their legal rights as secured by Paragraph 3, Section 2, Article IV of the Constitution:
No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.