Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Context

Article IV, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution included the following clause:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

By itself, the clause did not call for the federal government to assume the responsibility of recovering fugitives, and it did not employ the terms slave or slavery. Recognizing this, Congress in 1793 passed legislation providing for enforcement of this pledge by the federal judiciary as well as by local and state officials. The resulting act came to be known as the Fugitive Slave Act.

For decades to come slave catchers were employed by masters seeking the recovery of runaway slaves who had crossed state lines. Fugitive slaves could be recaptured at any time: There was no statute of limitations as to their status. At times slave catchers apprehended free blacks and sold them into slavery, the most famous case being that of Solomon Northup, a freeborn New Yorker who was enslaved for twelve years and later wrote about his captivity. In the case of Frederick Douglass, it was not until years after his escape that he had his freedom secured under law when a group of British benefactors bought his freedom.

The arbitrary nature of the recovery process—there was no provision about identifying the accused or definitions of standards of proof—led several northern states to pass legislation that offered some degree of legal protection for those apprehended under the statute. Such personal liberty laws, sometimes known as antikidnap laws, had existed in several states prior to the ratification of the Constitution, but more states adopted them in the decades after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Although the specific provisions varied from state to state, such legislation came to embody prohibitions against certain state officials from enforcing the act (sometimes under penalty of a fine), jury trials for the accused, the need to present evidence to prove the fact of identity and ownership, the necessity of a warrant, and other measures designed to protect free blacks from being captured and brought south. These measures multiplied in the 1830s and early 1840s as the nature of both the proslavery and abolition movements changed and debates over slavery became a more divisive aspect of American politics.

In 1842 the Supreme Court had a chance to rule on the constitutionality of personal liberty laws as a result of a case in which Pennsylvania and Maryland authorities cooperated to test Pennsylvania’s legislation federally. Edward Prigg of Maryland, who had been involved in an attempt to capture Margaret Morgan, a slave who had escaped from Maryland into Pennsylvania in violation of Pennsylvania law, was convicted of violating the law, with an eye toward bringing the dispute before the Supreme Court for final adjudication. Speaking for a majority of the Court, Associate Justice Joseph Story ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was constitutional, that the Pennsylvania personal liberty law was unconstitutional, and that the recovery of runaway slaves across state boundaries was a federal responsibility. He did, however, also rule that states need not enlist their officials to assist in the recapture and return of fugitive slaves from other states.

Prigg v. Pennsylvania thus opened the way for a new approach to the question of how to implement the Constitution’s fugitive slave recovery clause. Some northern states, led by Massachusetts, passed new personal liberty laws, as did Pennsylvania in 1847; northern states as a whole withdrew state assistance from enforcing the federal legislation. In 1848 South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler introduced a bill to improve existing legislation on the recovery of fugitive slaves, but his ideas did not get far prior to 1850.

The 1850 fugitive slave legislation was introduced by Virginia senator James Murray Mason on January 4, 1850, several weeks before Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky incorporated it into his proposal designed to settle all outstanding issues related to slavery. He based the bill in part on Butler’s 1848 proposal. Several southern senators were enraged when New York senator William H. Seward sought to amend the bill to provide for trial by jury for accused fugitives. Such opposition caused Mason to modify his proposal in order to strengthen it against such critics, including a provision authorizing the formation of a posse comitatus—that is, a temporary local police force—to execute warrants, a measure that could transform northern bystanders into slave catchers.

The debate over Mason’s measure proved divisive. Some southerners cited northern resistance to the recovery of fugitive slaves as a reason to convene in Nashville that summer so that southerners could consider their options, including possibly secession: Clay himself conceded the justice of southern complaints on that score, as did Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster. That Mason was unbending in his support of southern measures became apparent when he rose to deliver what proved to be the last Senate speech of John C. Calhoun, who was too ill to deliver it himself. That some antislavery northerners could not tolerate his proposal became evident when Seward denounced it in a lengthy speech in which he argued that there was a higher law than the Constitution.

Although Mason favored new legislation concerning the recapture of fugitive slaves, he opposed other compromise proposals, and he was not unhappy when Clay’s omnibus effort failed in July. Within weeks, however, due in large part to the legislative skill of Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, the bill passed as part of a decision to present each proposal separately under the assumption that each had a majority in support but that taken together not enough people would engage in the give-and-take of compromise needed to pass all the proposals as part of a larger bill. Mason aided this effort by once more proposing changes to his original measure while successfully resisting attempts to incorporate jury trials for the accused. This time his efforts were rewarded: The Fugitive Slave Act passed on September 18, 1850.