Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 - Wikipedia

On September 18, 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law as part of Compromise of 1850. From the article:

"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.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9]

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.[10]

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. No 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.[11]

"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.[12]

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."[13] 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.[14][15]

Many abolitionists openly defied the law. 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.[16]

That 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 and successfully smuggled him to Canada.[17] The Anthony Burns case was an example of an unsuccessful attempt by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law to use force to free a captured slave.[18] 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."[19] 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.[7]

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.[20] In Pittsburgh, for example, during the September following the passage of the law, organized "squads" of escaped slaves, armed and sworn to "die rather than be taken back into slavery," set out for Canada, with more than 200 men leaving by the end of the month.[7]

With the outbreak of the American Civil War, General Benjamin Butler justified refusing to return runaway slaves under the 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.[21] 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 Union forces from returning runaway slaves to their masters, and President Abraham Lincoln consolidated that shifting attitude towards slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, which made the institution's destruction an official war goal. Thus, both the spirit and the letter of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 were completely abandoned."