Fugitive Slave Act Quotes

The contents of Mr. Thorne's letter, as nearly as I can remember, were as follows: "I have seen your slave, Linda, and conversed with her. She can be taken very easily, if you manage prudently. There are enough of us here to swear to her identity as your property. I am a patriot, a lover of my country, and I do this as an act of justice to the laws.

The first requirement of a slave society is secure borders. We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that. Indeed, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it easy for whites to kidnap and sell free blacks into slavery, thousands of free African Americans realized they could not be safe even in Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.

In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause—the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.

At an 1854 Fourth of July abolitionist rally in Framinhmgham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of both the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the court's decision to send Burns back to Virginia. He also lit on fire the US Constitution, calling it "a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.

Frederick Douglass, so recently hopeful, was unhappy. The speech was “little better than our worst fears,” Douglass remarked. That the president continued to express respect for slavery where it existed was crushing; by pledging to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts, Douglass said, Lincoln had portrayed himself as “an excellent slave hound.” Douglass had been considering immigrating to Haiti, and he saw nothing in Lincoln’s inaugural address to change his mind—in fact, quite the opposite.

Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.

Last Sunday, our dear pastor informed the congregation that the peril for our community is far greater than homelessness. It’s these horrid voting requirements for colored men, only colored men. If a negro must prove his residency for three years at a freehold estate worth at least $250, how many black voters would we have left after the destruction of Seneca Village? One might say it matters little; as it stands the numbers are deplorable, merely 91 of 13,000 negro New Yorkers having the franchise. But we must start somewhere, and an appropriation of our village by the authorities would subtract 10 from that already pitiable colored voter roll. Ambrose, you voted for Senator Frémont of California, the first Republican on the presidential ticket! It may be your last chance to ever cast your ballot against slavery. Speaking of which—that defender of the curséd Fugitive Slave Act Buchanan was sworn in Wednesday! And now the Supreme Court has at long last handed down a decision for poor Mr. Dred Scott, the ramifications much worse than we had imagined. All in all, I would have to say this has been a very bad week for black folks. I can find hope only in the prospect that such severe reactionary measures may very well be evidence of the Court’s own sense of threat—that times are changing. I

Antislavery insurgencies gravely threatened racial capitalism and forced the hand of Southern politicians. Southern elites viewed the preservation of slavery and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act to be nonnegotiable. The leading white women of Broward’s Neck, Florida, informed the Jacksonville Standard shortly after the election of 1858, “In our humble opinion the single issue is now presented to the Southern people, will they submit to all the degradation threatened by the North toward our slave property and be made to what England has made white people experience in the West India Islands—the negroes afforded a place on the same footing with their former owners, to be made legislators, to sit as Judges.” In the spring of 1860, Democrats in Jacksonville stated that regardless of who was nominated to run for president, “The amplest protection and security to slave property in the territories owned by the General Government” and “the surrender [of] fugitive slaves when legally demanded” were vital to Florida’s interests. If these terms were not met, they asserted, “then we are of the opinion that the rights of the citizens of Florida are no longer safe in the Union, and we think that she should raise the banner of secession and invite her Southern sisters to join her.”47 The following year, John C. McGehee, the president of the Florida Secession Convention, gave the most concise reason why the majority of his colleagues supported secession: “At the South, and with our People of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise, and cumin” — abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! — And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.

Under the Fugitive Persons Act, those who escape from service are to be captured and returned, anywhere they are found in the United States, slave state or free. All law enforcement agencies are obliged to assist in these operations when called upon (as, indeed, “all good citizens” are so obliged), but it is the US Marshals Service that is specifically charged with the job. This law was passed in the ancient year of 1793 under its old name, but it’s been updated repeatedly: strengthened in 1850, reinforced in 1861, revised and strengthened a half dozen times since. When, in 1875, Congress at last ended slavery in the nation’s capital, the slaveholding powers were appeased by the raising of fees for obstruction. When President Roosevelt, in 1935, proposed the creation of a “comprehensive regulatory framework” for the plantations (and the Bureau of Labor Practices to enforce it), he quieted howling southern senators with a sweeping immunity bill, shielding US marshals from zealous northern prosecutors. Tit for tat. Give and take. Negotiation and conciliation. Compromise. It’s how the Union survives. People

There has not been a time in American history where our police force has not had a contentious and often violent relationship with communities of color. Our police forces were born from Night Patrols, who had the principal task of controlling black and Native American populations in New England, and Slave Patrols, who had the principal task of catching escaped black slaves and sending them back to slave masters.8 After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, catching and reenslaving black people became the job of Night Patrols as well, and that job was continued on after the Night Patrols were turned into the country’s first police forces. Our early American police forces existed not only to combat crime, but also to return black Americans to slavery and control and intimidate free black populations. Police were rightfully feared and loathed by black Americans in the North and South.

courts then made this fate hereditary, beginning with the Virginia colony in 1662. Because of the courts, if you were black and brought to the colonies by force, you were a slave. If you had children, they would be slaves, too. From then on, the terms black and slave were interchangeable.3 The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is a prime example of how the judicial system made the two synonymous.

The problem was so widespread that in 1793 Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave Act.

California was large, and southern California was of the same latitude as Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. To some it seemed logical and fair to split California into two—one slave, one free. But California had already decided on its identity as a free state. A different compromise was required, an olive branch to southern slaveholders, assuring them that California’s addition as the thirty-first state would not weaken slavery in the Union. The price was the elaborate Compromise of 1850 and, within it, the Fugitive Slave Act. California would not have become a state without it. And the Union would divide further because of it, the victory lap of Manifest Destiny, of gaining California and all its gold, serving as a very clear beginning of the end.

For George Washington, the very act he signed into being haunted him until death. Ona Judge, a twenty-two-year-old enslaved woman, owned by Washington, ran away from his household in the summer of 1793, when Washington signed the nation's most powerful Fugitive Slave Act. Washington immediately placed an ad for her recapture, and insinuated in the ad that he did not know what provocation caused Judge to run away. He seemed to not imagine that a human being held in lifelong bondage might desire freedom, especially from his plantation. Ona Judge remained in the free state of New Hampshire as a fugitive from slavery until her death in 1848.

Federal law enforcement officials, even in free states, were required to arrest fugitive slaves and anyone who assisted them and threatened with punishment if they failed to enforce the measure: “Any marshal or deputy marshal refuse to receive such warrant, or other process, when tendered, or to use all proper means diligently to execute the same, he shall, on conviction thereof, be fined in the sum of one thousand dollars.”41 The act nullified state laws and forced citizens and local officials to apprehend escaped slaves regardless of their convictions, religious views, or state or local laws and compelled citizens in free states to “aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required.”42 Penalties were harsh and the financial incentives for compliance attractive. “Anyone caught providing food and shelter to an escaped slave, assuming northern whites could discern who was a runaway, would be subject to a fine of one thousand dollars and six months in prison. The law also suspended habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury for captured blacks.

The Fugitive Slave Act ordered all citizens to assist law enforcement in apprehending fugitive slaves. It voided state laws in Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, which barred state officials from aid ing in the capture, arrest, or imprisonment of fugitive slaves. In the Fugitive Slave Act, Congress “nationalized slavery. No black person was safe on American soil. The old division of free state/slave state had vanished.”40 If there was any question of whose states’ rights Southern leaders supported, it was certainly not those of free states.

For most Northerners abolition only became an issue after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. So long as slavery was confined to the South and out of sight, the majority of Northerners showed little concern for the issue, while profiting from or reaping its benefits. Though Northerners wore clothes made of cotton harvested by slaves and corporations that supported the slave economy paid the wages of Northern workers and shareholders, few considered the moral issues until their state laws were overturned by Congress and Supreme Court.

In dealing with the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which outraged many Northerners, Lincoln conceded that when white Southerners “remind us of their constitutional rights,

Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history. 'Do you really think that it could happen here?' remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding 'Yes.' For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.' And 'it' was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of 'all men.

The Weekly Anglo-African was right. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of runaways fled to Union forces in the summer of 1861. But Union soldiers enforced the Fugitive Slave Act with such an iron fist that, according to one Maryland newspaper, more runaways were returned in three months of the war “than during the whole of Mr. Buchanan’s presidential term.

Butler's actions paved the way for the First Confiscation Act, signed into law on August 6, 1861. The act said that any slave utilized for the Confederate war effort was not protected by the Fugitive Slave Act and could be sheltered inside the Union. Because it was so difficult to prove that an escaped slave was not under Confederate auspices, virtually all escaped slaves were permitted sanctuary within federal forces—though a few Union officers, like army General Henry Halleck, continued to return them to their owners, at least until March 31, 1862, when it became a military crime to return contrabands. Although the runaways were not officially freed until Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Butler's legal maneuvering, followed by the First Confiscation Act, helped turn the wheels.9