Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Impact

Few measures fueled as much sectional controversy as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It was not long before some northerners actively resisted the enforcement of the new act, and white southerners called upon federal authorities, including President Millard Fillmore, to use military force to subdue such obstruction. Several cases attracted national attention. In October 1850 a slave catcher was foiled in his efforts to capture William and Ellen Craft, whose 1848 escape from Georgia had gained much attention, with Ellen posing as a male slaveholder and William as his valet. Rather than risk another recapture effort, the Crafts sailed for England by year’s end. Boston’s black community, aided by white allies, thwarted several more efforts to recover runaway slaves. However, on February 15, 1851, federal marshals apprehended Shadrach Minkins, who had fled Virginia the previous year, prior to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Members of Boston’s Vigilance Committee sprang into action, crowding the courtroom in which a hearing would be held to determine Minkins’s status. Antislavery lawyers prepared to defend him, despite the terms of the 1850 legislation that simply called for a determination of the accused’s identity and status. In a scuffle that followed, Minkins was freed and whisked off to Canada.

Eight months later another confrontation occurred in Syracuse, New York, where an effort to recapture William Henry (known as “Jerry”) and return him to his Missouri master resulted in a mob’s taking affairs into its own hands and freeing Henry. Secretary of State Daniel Webster fumed that such behavior constituted treason: Four men faced trial for their role in the rescue, but only the lone black defendant was convicted for violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 (not the 1850 law). Syracuse abolitionists celebrated “Jerry Rescue Day” for years to come.

In 1854 Boston witnessed yet another confrontation over the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Anthony Burns, a preacher, escaped from Richmond, Virginia, in 1853, and made his way to Boston. A year later Burns was arrested: Determined to avoid a repeat of what had happened in the Minkins case, President Franklin Pierce sent soldiers to Boston to enforce the law. On May 26 a mob stormed the courthouse intending to free Burns, but Burns was returned to his master in Virginia, who sold him after rejecting offers from abolitionists who sought to buy Burns’s freedom. Burns’s new owner had no such compunctions about selling Burns, who returned to Boston a free man.

These sensational events provided only part of the story, however. Although slaveholders and their agents prevailed in 80 percent of the cases brought before commissioners, the number of alleged fugitives brought before the commissioners was but a small percentage of the slaves who had escaped from captivity. If personal liberty laws presented no real obstacle to the recovery of fugitives, their continued presence still stood as a mark of defiance against the federal government’s efforts to support slavery. If, in the end, only twenty-three slaves escaped federal custody, the presence of northern antislavery mobs, litigious antislavery lawyers, and operators of the Underground Railroad in facilitating the escape of slaves northward complicated the task of federal authorities. Many northern whites simply wanted nothing to do with the recapture of runaway slaves.

White southerners pointed to northern resistance as highlighting the necessity for greater safeguards for their constitutional property rights. They were joined in this sentiment by several prominent northerners, including presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, as well as Daniel Webster. When several northern states fashioned new measures to protect the rights of accused runaways, the federal government did what it could to set those measures aside, most notably in the Supreme Court’s 1859 decision in Ableman v. Booth, which overturned a decision by Wisconsin’s supreme court that had declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional.

By itself, although the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 aroused controversy, it did little to shift the balance in national politics. Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce swept to victory in the 1852 presidential contest in the wake of the act’s passage. It would not be until 1854, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that the politics of sectional controversy truly ignited. Antislavery northerners pointed to the act as part of an effort by proslavery southerners to subvert civil rights, and the act’s embrace of federal power challenged the notion that proslavery southerners were consistent advocates of states’ rights and restrictions on federal power. In turn, white southerners pointed to resistance in the North as evidence of bad faith at best and treason at worst, and proponents of secession highlighted the northern response to the Fugitive Slave Act as evidence that slavery was not safe within the Union.

As distasteful as many white northerners found the business of recapturing slaves and involving northerners in the preservation of slavery, they conceded that the U.S. Constitution provided for the recovery of runaway slaves. They criticized the law as a poor and unfair implementation of that promise. Among such critics was Abraham Lincoln, who repeatedly claimed that he would honor the constitutional promise while objecting to the way the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 proposed to keep that promise. In the late 1850s Lincoln favored a revision of fugitive slave legislation consistent with other principles, although he never offered a specific proposal. Lincoln hoped to calm southern concerns about the violations of the constitutional provisions, and he reiterated his position as president-elect in an effort to counter secessionists’ use of northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act as justification for secession. He repeated his pledge in his first inaugural address.

The Civil War provided a Republican-controlled Congress with a means to destroy the Fugitive Slave Act through a series of acts. In August 1861 Congress authorized the seizure of any slave who was being used to support the Confederate war effort as contraband of war. That law simply turned slaveholders’ insistence that slaves were property on its head by saying that such property was subject to seizure under the laws of war. As Union forces penetrated the Confederacy, more slaves sought refugee within Union lines. Lacking an overall policy, Union military personnel devised a number of responses to slave owners’ requests for protection. Some units closed their lines to fugitives; others returned them to owners on a case-by-case basis, sometimes offering refuge to the runaways. Congress remedied this confusion in March 1862, when it forbade military authorities to return slaves who entered their lines, although this mandate was not always observed. The following July, Congress passed a second confiscation act, declaring free all slaves who belonged to Confederate supporters and sympathizers. Five days later President Abraham Lincoln broached to his cabinet the idea of issuing a proclamation of emancipation. The proposal was shelved until September, when Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, giving the Confederate states one hundred days in which to return to the Union or face the loss of their slaves. The offer was ignored, whereupon Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring free those slaves in enumerated areas deemed to be under Confederate control.

In less than two years, the U.S. government had gone from enforcing a legal obligation to capture and return fugitive slaves to harboring fugitives and granting them their freedom. However, the Fugitive Slave Act remained on the books, and it still applied in areas under Union control when loyal masters sought the return of fugitives not under military control. This situation did not last long, for on June 28, 1864, Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.