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Fugitive Slave Laws and Acts
6 articles on Fugitive Slave Laws and Acts
Fugitive Slave Law of 1793
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 2823 Includes: BibliographyArticle IV, section 2, clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution provided that “no person held to service or labour” in one state and who escaped to another state could be freed from that obligation, but instead had to be “delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” This provision, known as the fugitive slave clause, did not set out how this process was to be administered. The clause was added to the U.S. Constitution late in the Constitutional Convention, with no serious debate over its meaning or implementation. It was first discussed in the context of the states' returning fugitive criminals. All the delegates agreed that the states should cooperate in capturing and returning fugitives from justice. On 28 August, while debating that provision, Pierce ButlerCharles ...
Read full articleFugitive Slave Law of 1850
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 4277 Includes: BibliographyThe Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was technically an amendment to the federal act of 1793 that regulated both criminal extradition and the return of fugitive slaves. The 1793 law never worked well, and almost immediately some southerners asked for a new law. By the mid-1840s editors and politicians throughout the South were demanding a new, more effective law. The key issue for southerners was an enforcement mechanism that would help them recover their fugitives and return home safely with them. The 1793law authorized all state judges and magistrates, as well as all federal judges, to issue certificates of removal to allow masters to take fugitive slaves back to the South. However, many northern jurists refused to cooperate with the implementation of the law. Since there were very few federal judges at the time—usually only one in a state—slave owners ...
Read full articleFugitive Slave Laws
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Laws passed by the Congress of the United States in 1793 and 1850 providing for the return of runaway slaves to their owners. Before the American colonies won independence from Great Britain, several legislatures in Southern colonies passed laws providing for the return of runaway slaves. Under some of these laws, slaves who resisted arrest could be killed, and their owners would be reimbursed by the government. Other laws levied penalties against people who protected runaways and offered rewards to those who caught them. However, these laws had little effect outside the colonies that passed them, leaving those in other colonies free to harbor escaped slaves.In 1787the Congress of the Confederation passed the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery from the Northwest Territory but allowed slaves who fled to the territory to ...
Read full articleFugitive Slave Act
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 453(1850). Drafted by Senator James Y. Mason of Virginia and the product of months of contentious debate in the Senate, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was signed into law by President Millard Fillmore as part of the Compromise of 1850. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an ardent critic, denounced the law as unconstitutional, but Daniel Webster, in a famous speech on 7 March, supported it as part of a larger political effort to preserve the Union. The southern senators John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis doubted that the law would achieve its purpose, but they did not oppose it. Organized opposition to the law in the North faded after the summer of 1851. The Supreme Court in Ableman v. Booth (1859) affirmed the law's constitutionality.The Fugitive Slave Act authorized newly appointed fugitive slave commissioners to ...
Read full articleFugitive Slave Act of 1793 (12 February 1793)
Word Count: 609One of the difficulties of a nation in which some states held slavery to be legal and other states had abolished it was the legal status of fugitive slaves. This was not an issue that escaped the attention of the framers of the United States Constitution. Although, as usual, no mention is made of the word slavery, Article IV, Section 2 makes clear that each state is to honor the laws of every other state in this regard. That article guaranteed the right to repossess in a different state any “person held to service or labor,” but it did not go into any detail about how that was to be accomplished.Under the circumstances, however, with widely divergent views prevailing of the moral and legal aspects of slavery, detail was found to be necessary. There were continual conflicts between abolitionists and slave-catchers, and ...
Read full articleFugitive Slave Act of 1850 (18 September 1850)
Word Count: 3158The provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 are almost unimaginable. It is difficult to believe that the “states'-rights” South could so blatantly demand federal power to defend slavery, and it is almost impossible to imagine that the increasingly antislavery North would agree to that demand. Legally, before the act was passed, free states were supposed to help slaveowners apprehend and return to servitude slaves who had run away. In practice the free states did not do much in this regard. So the Fugitive Slave Act took that responsibility out of their hands and put it in the hands of the federal government. The government could deputize people against their will to help in a slave chase. Federal commissioners held trials to determine whether the captive actually was a slave. More federal officials were to be assigned solely to upholding the provisions of the act. ...
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