Fugitive Slave Laws

I

Introduction

Fugitive Slave Laws, acts passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850, intended to facilitate the recapture and extradition of runaway slaves and to commit the federal government to the legitimacy of holding property in slaves. Both laws ultimately provoked dissatisfaction and rancor throughout the country. Northerners questioned the laws' infringements on civil liberty and deplored the national character they lent to the South's institution. Southerners complained that the laws were circumvented both because of legal deficiencies (especially the law of 1793) and growing popular hostility to enforcement. The controversy grew with the Republic itself.

II

The Constitution and the Law of 1793

Aware that the northern states might become havens of refuge for escaped slaves, South Carolina's delegates at the Constitutional Convention (1787) sought the return of slaves on the same basis as the extradition of common criminals. They were unsuccessful. Article IV, Section 2, merely stated that persons “held to Service or Labour” in one state who escape into another state “shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” The ambiguity of the document made necessary the law of 1793 whereby the process of taking custody was first defined. The statute authorized slave owners or their agents to apprehend fugitives in any state or territory and provided that owners could apply to a circuit or district judge for a certificate to take custody of runaways. The law did not, however, grant judges power to issue warrants of arrest, nor did it require federal marshals to assist owners. The law was not uniformly enforced, and its legal defects irritated slaveholders.

Further difficulties arose from free-state legislation defining citizenship, a necessary accompaniment to the gradual emancipation acts (1776-1827) that ultimately abolished northern slavery. These early personal liberty laws were partly designed to protect free blacks from dishonest slave-catchers. Organized antislavery efforts in the 1830s denounced northern complicity in bondage, citing the act of 1793 as a primary example. Southern dissatisfaction, in turn, mounted as slaveholders detected antislavery conspiracies in a growing movement to rescue the fugitives. See Underground Railroad.

III

The Law of 1850

In an attempt to lay the issue to rest, Congress enacted a law in 1850 that created commissioners under federal court appointment to adjudicate fugitive cases. They had active roles in ensuring retrieval of escaped slaves. Federal marshals also were enjoined to help recapture slaves, under $1000 penal fines for dereliction. If a runaway escaped while in a marshal's custody, the marshal had to forfeit the slave's full value to the owner. Persons guilty of abetting slave escape were subject to fine and a maximum prison sentence of six months. As in southern courts, slaves could not testify against whites, but a master's circumstantial evidence was easily admissible. Federal commissioners received $5 for proslave verdicts, $10 for decisions favorable to masters. If warranted by a threat of interference, federal officers were authorized to accompany the slave out of the area of risk.

---

---

IV

Northern Resistance to the Laws

Owing to northern resentments, the acts of 1793 and 1850 faced legal challenges, primarily in the form of jurisdictional disputes over state personal liberty laws. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled against a Pennsylvania citizenship statute and upheld the first fugitive slave law's constitutionality. Nevertheless, some states continued to pass laws strengthening the applicability of habeas corpus writs and prohibiting state officials from accepting jurisdiction under federal law. In Ohio, the chief objective was less a desire to expand black rights than to ensure that outright kidnapping was not condoned. (Ohio did not repeal its virulently discriminatory Black Code until 1849.) Southerners objected strenuously to personal liberty laws as a violation of sectional equity and reciprocal trust; but the 1850 act, seen in the North as punitive and tyrannical, only aroused greater sectional animosities. Northern opposition was most dramatically illustrated when an abolitionist Boston mob tried to rescue Anthony Burns, a fugitive from Virginia, in May 1854. The mission failed. Commissioner Edward Loring had Burns remanded to slavery, and U.S. troops escorted him through sullen crowds to a waiting ship. The effort cost the federal government more than $100,000.

The legal conflict that pitted northern personal liberty statutes against federal fugitive slave measures reflected the concepts of double sovereignty that citizens of the federated Union then entertained. Southerners insisted on the sovereignty of the states, but in this controversy northerners “nullified” unwelcome federal laws. Although the constitutionality of the fugitive slave laws was unquestioned, only the force of arms could finally define the nature of the Union, its source of authority, and the boundaries of liberty. See also Compromise Measures of 1850.