Fugitive Slave Act of 1793

Impact

The results of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 emerged over time. At first, the law’s impact was minimal, although it did provide an example of how the early Congress understood federalism (that is, the relation of the national government to state governments). The law had not been passed to stem a tide of fugitive slaves and did not appear to have any immediate impact either on the number of slaves who fled or the number returned to slaveholding states.

Closely related to the fugitive slave problem was kidnapping—the act of seizing a free black and selling him or her into slavery. In April 1796, the House of Representatives asked its Committee of Commerce and Manufactures to consider the problem of kidnapping. After debate, the committee declined to report an antikidnapping bill. Another house committee appointed in 1799 concluded that the Fugitive Slave Act might be contributing to the problem of kidnapping. Because the statute authorized slaveholders to seize their slaves without a warrant, unscrupulous kidnappers could easily seize and carry off free blacks simply by claiming them as fugitive slaves. Despite evidence of these practices, Congress declined to act in the 1790s, leaving the problem and its resolution to the individual states.

Kidnapping became a more serious problem after 1800. The expanding Atlantic market created a cotton and sugar boom in the trans-Appalachian South. Planters moved westward to take advantage of the huge profits in these cash crops and, in the process, created a huge demand for labor. Congress closed the international slave trade in 1808, leaving western planters without a ready supply of slave labor to fill plantations in the southern interior. The result was the creation of an internal slave trade. All told, more than one million slaves were carried across the Appalachians between 1810 and 1861, destined for plantations as far west as Texas and as far north as Missouri. This high demand created a ready market for unscrupulous kidnappers.

In response to this situation, states passed antikidnapping laws, commonly called “personal liberty laws.” Some states, such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Virginia, already had antikidnapping laws on the books. Ohio passed an antikidnapping law in 1804, Vermont in 1806, and New York in 1808. By 1830, all free states (excepting New Hampshire and Rhode Island) had personal liberty laws. Slave states did as well. Virginia and Delaware had such laws as early as 1787. Mississippi passed an antikidnapping statute in 1820 and Georgia passed one in 1835. These laws were not mere window dressing. Delaware, a slave state, actively prosecuted kidnappers under its laws.

Personal liberty laws often specified procedures for fugitive slave rendition as well, giving magistrates guidelines as to what evidence would constitute proof of a fugitive’s status. Many of these laws, such as Ohio’s 1804 law, were favorable to slaveholders. Pennsylvania, where abolitionists became increasingly influential, passed stricter laws. In 1820 the state withdrew the use of its resources to aid in fugitive slave rendition and fixed a twenty-year prison sentence for kidnapping a free black. This made fugitive slave recaption difficult. Slaveholders could not rely on the skeletal federal court system to obtain legal cover for seizing fugitives and now faced almost certain indictment under Pennsylvania law if they failed to gain legal cover. After an official complaint from the Maryland legislature, Pennsylvania revised its law in 1826. The new personal liberty law outlawed private recaption by requiring slaveholders to obtain a warrant for the arrest of an alleged fugitive. After capture, an alleged fugitive had an opportunity to prove his or her freedom before a judge before a certificate of removal would be issued.

Although this law followed the basic dictates of the Fugitive Slave Act in that it prescribed a summary procedure for fugitive slave rendition and made the states’ courts and peace officers available to slaveholders, it deviated significantly from the federal law by prohibiting private recaption. Nonetheless, the law was the product of cooperation on the part of Maryland and Pennsylvania and was meant to fulfill the state’s requirements under the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and to protect free blacks’ liberty. New York and New Jersey passed similar laws in the 1820s.

Many abolitionists were not content with protecting free blacks from kidnapping, but wanted to strike a more general blow at slavery. One way to do so was to protect fugitives, whom abolitionists regarded as refugees from a morally reprehensible and illegal slave regime. Abolitionists had extended legal help to fugitives since the late eighteenth century but stepped up efforts in the 1810s.

One abolitionist courtroom tactic was to argue that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was unconstitutional on three grounds. First, abolitionists complained that the institution of a summary procedure violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a jury trial in all cases where liberty was at stake. Second, they argued that the determination of someone’s status was a matter of plenary state authority. Because the Tenth Amendment reserved all powers not expressly enumerated in the Constitution to the states, the determination of who was a fugitive belonged to the individual states. Third, abolitionists argued that Congress had no constitutional warrant to legislate with regard to fugitive slaves at all. Continuing with the argument that sovereignty was reserved to the states, it followed that the only powers held by the federal government were “express powers” (that is, those expressly enumerated in the Constitution), they argued that the fugitive slave clause lacked “enabling” language and therefore did not empower Congress to act. Against those who said that the power to act should be implied, abolitionists pointed to specific enabling clauses in all the other sections of Article IV. Following the judicial rule of statutory construction that expressio unius, exclusio alterius—“the express mention of one thing excludes all others”—abolitionists concluded that the lack of an enabling clause in Article IV, Section 2, must have been intentional. In short, abolitionist lawyers made a strong states’ rights argument against Congress’s ability to enforce the fugitive slave clause.

These arguments did not fare well in the courtroom. Judges proved uniformly reluctant to declare the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 unconstitutional and consistently refused to extend Sixth Amendment jury trials to alleged fugitives on the principle that slaves were not a party to the Constitution and thus were offered no protections under the Bill of Rights. Nonetheless, courts did extend some protection to alleged fugitive slaves. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in Wright v. Deacon (1819) that a state habeas corpus proceeding was allowed under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The Massachusetts Supreme Court reached a similar decision in Commonwealth v. Griffith (1823). These decisions, it should be noted, both resulted in the return of fugitive slaves to slavery. Nonetheless, they reaffirmed the power of the states to protect their free black residents.

When the Fugitive Slave Act and personal liberty laws conflicted, courts often ruled in favor of federal law. Such was the case with In re Susan (1818), when the federal district court in Indiana ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act took precedence over the state’s personal liberty law. The New York Supreme Court ruled similarly in Jack v. Martin (1834), hinting for the first time that personal liberty laws themselves might be unconstitutional. Although the case was upheld in the New York Court for the Correction of Errors in 1835, that court refused to suggest that personal liberty laws were unconstitutional. Not every court ruled that federal law had to take precedence. Chief Justice Joseph Hornblower of the New Jersey Superior Court ruled in 1836 that a writ of habeas corpus could interrupt a federal hearing for a certificate of removal.

The Supreme Court addressed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 in the landmark case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). The case stemmed from the capture of Margaret Morgan and her two children. Margaret was the child of slaves who had been freed after the War of 1812. She married a free man and moved from Maryland to Pennsylvania. In 1837 the widow of Margaret’s former owner sent an agent, Edward Prigg, to reclaim Margaret as a fugitive slave. When Prigg could not find a Pennsylvania magistrate to issue him a certificate of removal, he took Margaret Morgan and her children to Maryland anyway and was indicted by a Pennsylvania grand jury for kidnapping under Pennsylvania’s 1826 personal liberty law. Given that one of Morgan’s children had been born in Pennsylvania and was thus free by Pennsylvania law, the state had a compelling kidnapping case. Maryland’s governor refused to extradite Prigg, but after commissioners from the two states communicated, the Pennsylvania legislature created a pro forma case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court with the consent of all parties.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania upheld the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 as a constitutional exercise of congressional power. Additionally, the Court held that personal liberty laws that interfered with fugitive slave extradition were unconstitutional. This opinion benefited slaveholders immensely, freeing them from the threat of legal action and cumbersome legal procedures imposed by the states. But it also left slaveholders exposed. The Supreme Court had held that no constitutional authority could compel the states to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. Subsequently, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island passed laws forbidding state officers to assist in fugitive slave rendition. In Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan, abolitionists continued to fight the Fugitive Slave Act utilizing state laws and were successful more than once. Although the ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania was upheld again by the Supreme Court in Jones v. Van Zandt (1847), the law was virtually useless at this point in returning escaped slaves to chains. By 1850 southern states complained that nearly a thousand slaves per year were escaping north to freedom.

On September 18, 1850, President Millard Fillmore signed a new Fugitive Slave Act into law that, in essence, replaced the first. The new law created an exclusive federal jurisdiction for fugitive slave rendition and forbade the states from interfering in any way with the process. It proved to be one of the most controversial laws passed by the antebellum Congress and was repealed in 1864 by a Congress shorn of representatives from the slaveholding states, which had seceded before the Civil War.