Fugitive Slaves In colonial America the interjurisdictional return of runaway slaves was sporadic, despite occasional agreements on the matter, such as that in the New England Confederation of 1643. In Somerset v. Stewart (1772), the Court of King's Bench ruled that any slave who came to England, either by the voluntary action of his master or by running away, might claim his freedom because there was no positive law establishing slavery in England. This precedent was part of the American common law when some of the newly independent American states began to abolish slavery during the Revolution. Pennsylvania's Gradual Emancipation Act of 1780 allowed for the recapture of fugitive slaves, as did similar laws passed in other states. The Articles of Confederation, however, did not obligate states to return fugitive slaves. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory but also provided that a fugitive slave “may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service.”

Late in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, South Carolina's Pierce Butler proposed a clause to “require fugitive slaves and servants to be delivered up like criminals.” The next day, without any further debate or recorded dissent, the delegates adopted what became the Fugitive Slave Clause, providing that runaways could not be emancipated in the states to which they escaped but were to “be delivered up on Claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” The framers seemed to contemplate enforcement of the clause by state and local governments or through individual action. The location of the clause in Article IV, alongside other clauses dealing with interstate relations, supports this analysis.

In the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, Congress spelled out procedure for the return of runaways. The law allowed masters or their agents capturing fugitives to bring them to any magistrate, state or federal, to obtain a “certificate of removal” and then to take the runaway back to the state where the slave owed service. The law provided fines for those who interfered with the rendition process and preserved masters' rights to seek damages from those who knowingly helped fugitive slaves.

Before the 1830s many northern states passed personal‐liberty laws to protect their free black populations from kidnapping or mistaken seizure. These statutes also provided state procedures to facilitate the return of bona fide fugitives. The northern states balanced protection of their free black population from kidnapping against compliance with their constitutional obligation to return runaway slaves. Until 1842 the constitutionality of both the state laws and the federal law remained in doubt. However, in Jack v. Martin (1835), New York's highest court declared the federal law unconstitutional but remanded the runaway slave Jack to his owner because the court believed New York was obligated to enforce the Fugitive Slave Clause of Article IV. A year later, in an unpublished opinion, Chief Justice Joseph Hornblower of New Jersey declared the federal law of 1793 unconstitutional and also declared the black man in question free.

In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story held that the 1793 law was constitutional and that state personal‐liberty laws interfering with the rendition process were not. Story characterized the Fugitive Slave Clause as a “fundamental article” of the Constitution necessary for its adoption, even though the history of the clause, which Story knew, shows that this was not true (p. 541). Story urged state officials to continue to enforce the 1793 law but stated that they could not be required to do so. A number of states soon passed new personal‐liberty laws prohibiting their officials from acting under the federal law.

In Jones v. Van Zandt (1847), the Supreme Court upheld a particularly harsh interpretation of the 1793 law in a civil suit for the value of slaves who had escaped from Kentucky to Ohio, where Van Zandt offered them a ride in his wagon. Van Zandt's attorneys, Salmon P. Chase and William H. Seward, unsuccessfully argued that in Ohio all people were presumed free and thus Van Zandt had no reason to know he was transporting runaway slaves.

As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress revised the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, creating more arbitrary rendition procedures and harsher penalties. Under this statute, accused fugitives could not testify on their own behalf or benefit from trial by jury. In reaction to state refusals to participate in the rendition process, the 1850 law provided federal commissioners, appointed in every county in the country, to enforce the law. They received five dollars if they decided that the black person before them was not a slave but were paid ten dollars if they found in favor of the claimant. Popular opposition to the law increased after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's highly successful fictional attack on slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

The 1850 law led to riots, rescues, and recaptures in Boston, Massachusetts; Syracuse, New York; Christiana, Pennsylvania; Oberlin, Ohio; Racine, Wisconsin; and elsewhere. Federal prosecutions of rescuers often failed. In Christiana more than forty men were indicted for treason after a group of fugitives fought their would‐be captors and killed a slaveowner. The defendants were released when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Grier, on circuit, ruled in United States v. Hanway (1851) that opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act did not constitute treason. After these incidents, the act was a dead letter in much of the North. In Ableman v. Booth (1859), stemming from the Racine rescue, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the 1850 law and the supremacy of the federal courts.

Peaceful enforcement of the 1850 law was sometimes possible, especially along the Ohio River and the Mason‐Dixon line. Some removals required a show of federal force and the use of troops. Under the 1850 act, more than nine hundred fugitives were returned between 1850 and 1861. Southerners estimated, however, that as many as ten thousand slaves escaped during that period.

Ultimately the Fugitive Slave Clause and the two statutes passed to enforce it did little to protect southern property but did much to antagonize sectional feelings. Southerners saw the North as unwilling to fulfill its constitutional obligation. Northerners believed the South was trying to force them to become slave catchers and, in the process, to undermine civil liberties in the nation.

See also Comity; Fugitives from Justice; State Sovereignty and States' Rights.

Bibliography

Paul Finkelman , Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Northern State Courts: Anti‐Slavery Use of a Pro‐Slavery Decision, Civil War History 24 (March 1979): 5–35.
Paul Finkelman , An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (1981).
Thomas D. Morris , Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (1974).

Paul Finkelman

FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT OF 1850

The roots of the American Civil War (1861–1865) were complex, but the conflict-ridden issue of slavery is rightly given prominence by most scholars. At its base, the Civil War pitted fundamentally different regional and socio-economic forces against each other. Although agriculture had dominated the economy of the early American republic, its importance varied by region. Farming defined the economy of the South, which evolved into an agricultural aristocracy based on slavery. The states of New England, however, were shaped by very different natural forces. Deprived of fertile soil, society in New England developed an energetic mercantile culture in sharp contrast with the lifestyle of the South. The Northern region gave birth to influential merchant and business classes, whose wealth had little or no connection to the land. Although the middle colonies enjoyed a more mixed economy, they were inevitably influenced by the great trading and business centers of New York and Philadelphia.

Understandably, both the Northern and Southern cultures viewed its rival as a significant, if not mortal, threat to its way of life. As the first half of the nineteenth century drew to a close, many Southerners tightly embraced safeguards to their way of life as they felt increasingly threatened by the dynamic and often turbulent urban culture of the North. One such safeguard was the cluster of constitutional and legal provisions that mandated the return of runaway slaves to their legal owners.

As part of the sectional compromise that ensured the ratification of the Constitution, Article IV, section 2 of the document directed that "no person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any laws or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." Congress subsequently enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 to specify procedures to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves.

Although slaveholders possessed formal legal remedies to recover runaway slaves, these measures, including the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, were routinely scorned in the North, where anti-slavery sentiment was generally strong. Ironically, Southern slaveholders, who routinely invoked the doctrine of states' rights to help protect the institution of slavery, were often frustrated in the recovery of runaway slaves by personal liberty laws enacted by the legislatures of several northern states. In one variant, personal liberty laws forbade state officials from participation in efforts to return fugitive slaves.

The question of runaway slaves was again placed before Congress in the famous Compromise of 1850. The compromise attempted to solve growing North-South tensions over the extension of slavery, specifically into newly annexed Texas and the territory gained by the United States in the Mexican War (1850–1853). The compromise measures originated largely from Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861) and were sponsored in the Senate by Henry Clay (1777–1852). The compromise called for the admission of California as a free state, the use of popular sovereignty to decide free or slave status for New Mexico and Utah, the prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and the passage of a stricter fugitive slave law. The prospects for the acceptance of these proposals were reinforced by the powerful speeches of statesman Daniel Webster (1782–1852), and the presidency of Millard Fillmore (1850–1853), a supporter of the compromise who stepped into office after the death of President Zachary Taylor (1784–1850). The proposals were passed as separate bills in September 1850.

The Fugitive Slave Law was arguably the most controversial part of the Compromise of 1850. The law carried a number of provisions that strengthened slaveholders in their pursuit of runaways. Federal commissioners were to be appointed with the power to issue warrants and mobilize posses. Suspected runaways were denied due process of law, and could be sent to the South on the basis of an owner's affidavit.

Southern opinion had been inflamed by a long record of Northern obstruction of the recovery of runaways. The so-called Georgia Platform adopted in late 1850 held that the fate of the union itself now depended on the North's faithful observance of the new fugitive slave act. Such cooperation was not forthcoming. Popular opposition to the recovery of slaves received frequent coverage in northern and southern newspapers. At the same time, a number of northern states passed stronger personal liberty laws. In Wisconsin, a reporter was arrested for encouraging a mob to free a captured runaway. The state court released him on a writ of habeas corpus (a court order determining an individual was confined illegally) and held the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. Although the Supreme Court upheld the law in Abelman v. Booth (1859), the effort provided Southerners little comfort.

The single greatest blow to the Fugitive Slave Act and to the Southern cause came from northern printing presses. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) to write her famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. The novel was a powerful and convincing indictment against slavery, and over 300,000 copies of the novel were sold in a year, an astronomical amount for that time. Although the injustices of the Fugitive Slave Act and the emotions stirred by Stowe's novel did not likely convince most Americans that the abolition of slavery would justify a civil war or the dissolution of the Union, the outcomes of the Fugitive Slave Act did lead many Americans to reject any future efforts at political compromise over differences between the North and South.

See also: Civil War (Economic Causes of), Slavery, States' Rights

FURTHER READING

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

David, Paul A. et al. Reckoning With Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Franklin, John Hope and Schweninger, Loren. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

FUGITIVE SLAVE ACTS

FUGITIVE SLAVE ACTS. In 1793, Congress passed an act to implement the provision in the U.S. Constitution (Article IV, Section 2) stating that "fugitives from labour" should be returned "on demand" to the person to whom they owed "service or labour." The 1793 law allowed a master to bring an alleged fugitive slave before any state or federal judge or magistrate for a summary hearing to determine if the person seized was the claim-ant's runaway slave. The judge could accept any evidence he found persuasive on the status of the alleged slave. He could then issue a certificate of removal, allowing the claimant to take the slave back to his home state. The law provided a $500 fine for anyone interfering with the return of a fugitive slave. In addition, a master could sue anyone helping his slave for his costs plus the actual value of any slaves actually lost.

These liberal rules, as well as blatant kidnapping of free blacks, led northern states to pass personal liberty acts to protect their black residents from illegitimate removal. In the Supreme Court case of Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1842) Justice Joseph Story, speaking for an 8–1 majority, upheld the 1793 law, struck down all state laws that interfered with the return of a fugitive slaves, and declared that slave owners had a common law right of recaption to remove any slave without any judicial hearing, if this seizure could be accomplished without any breach of the peace. Meanwhile, in Jones v. Van Zandt (1847), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a harsh interpretation of the 1793 law, which in effect applied to the north the southern legal presumption that all blacks were slaves until it could be proved otherwise.

Unable to protect their black residents, many free states passed new personal liberty laws withdrawing state support for enforcement of the 1793 law. Without state aid, slave owners had to rely on the tiny number of federal judges and marshals to aid them in their quest for runaway slaves.

In the wake of these new laws southerners demanded stronger federal enforcement, which led to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Technically an amendment of the 1793 law, the 1850 law was in reality an entirely new approach to the problem. The 1850 law allowed for the appointment of federal commissioners throughout the nation. These commissioners would hear fugitive slave cases and were empowered to call out federal marshals, posses, or the military to aid masters in recovering runaways. Penalties for violating the law included a $1,000 fine and a six-month jail sentence. In addition, anyone helping a fugitive slave could be sued for a $1,000 penalty to compensate the master for the loss of the slave.

Hearings before the commissioners were summary affairs, with no jury present. The alleged slave was denied access to the writ of habeas corpus and could not testify at the hearing. A U.S. Commissioner hearing the case would get $5 if he decided in favor of the alleged slave, but if he held for the master he would get $10. This disparity was in theory designed to compensate commissioners for the extra work of filling out certificates of removal, but to most northerners it seemed a blatant attempt to help slavery at the expense of justice.

The law led to riots, rescues, and resistance in a number of places. In 1851 a mob stormed a courtroom in Boston to free the slave Shadrach; in Syracuse a mob rescued the slave Jerry from a jail; and in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a master was killed in a shootout with fugitive slaves. In 1854, Milwaukee citizens led by the abolitionist editor Sherman Booth freed the slave Joshua Glover from federal custody, and, in 1858, most of the students and faculty of Oberlin College charged a courthouse and freed a slave arrested in Wellington, Ohio. All of these cases led to prosecutions, but most were unsuccessful or led to only token penalties. In Ableman v. Booth (1859), the U.S. Supreme Court firmly upheld the 1850 law and asserted that states could interfere with the federal courts.

In the long run, the fugitive slave laws did little to help recover runaway slaves, but they did much to under-mine the Union. Outrage over the 1850 law in the North helped create the constituency for the Republican Party and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Meanwhile, a number of southern states cited failure to enforce the fugitive slave laws as one of their reasons for secession (1861). In 1864, the Republican-dominated Congress repealed both fugitive slave laws.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

Finkelman, Paul. Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985.

———. "Story Telling on the Supreme Court: Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Justice Joseph Story's Judicial Nationalism." Supreme Court Review (1994): 247–294.

Morris, Thomas D. Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

PaulFinkelman

See alsoAntislavery ; Slave Insurrections ; Slave Rescue Cases ; Slavery ; Underground Railroad .

FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT OF 1850

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 mandated that states to which escaped slaves fled were obligated to return them to their masters upon their discovery and subjected persons who helped runaway slaves to criminal sanctions. The first Fugitive Slave Act was enacted by Congress in 1793 but as the northern states abolished slavery, the act was rarely enforced. The southern states bitterly resented the northern attitude toward slavery, which was ultimately demonstrated by the existence of the Underground Railroad, an arrangement by which abolitionists helped runaway slaves obtain freedom.

To placate the South, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (9 Stat. 462) was enacted by Congress as part of the compromise of 1850. It imposed a duty on all citizens to assist federal marshals to enforce the law or be prosecuted for their failure to do so. The act also required that when a slave was captured, he or she was to be brought before a federal court or commissioner, but the slave would not be tried by a jury nor would his or her testimony be given much weight. The statements of the slave's alleged owner were the main evidence, and the alleged owner was not even required to appear in court.

Northern reaction against the Fugitive Slave Act was strong, and many states enacted laws that nullified its effect, making it worthless. In cases where the law was enforced, threats or acts of mob violence often required the dispatch of federal troops. Persons convicted of violating the act were often heavily fined, imprisoned, or both. The refusal of northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act was alleged by South Carolina as one reason for its secession from the Union prior to the onset of the Civil War.

The acts of 1793 and 1850 remained legally operative until their repeal by Congress on June 28, 1864 (13 Stat. 200).

Fugitive Slave Acts US legislation providing for the return of escaped slaves to their masters. After the abolition of slavery in the northern states of the USA, these “free states” became lax in enforcing the first Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The second Act, part of the COMPROMISE OF 1850, introduced more stringent regulations, specifically aimed at the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. Unpopular in the North, it added fuel to the slavery controversy, and “liberty laws” passed by free states to thwart the Act drove the South further towards rebellion. Fugitive slave legislation was finally repealed in 1864.

Fugitive Slave Law a law enacted by Congress in 1793 to enable the return of runaway slaves to their owners. It allowed slave owners to retrieve a runaway in any state or territory and to apply to a judge for a custody certificate. Some Northerners opposed it as a violation of civil liberties, and slaveholders argued that its provisions were too ambiguous.

A second Fugitive Slave Law was passed as a measure of the Compromise of 1850.