Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

By: Paul Finkelman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

The 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 1793 law 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 had to rely on often uncooperative state officials to gain custody of their slaves. In addition, the 1793 law did not provide any government support for the removal of a slave. Thus, slave owners had to find their slaves and transport them back to the South at their own expense. In addition, they had to protect themselves from abolitionists who might try to rescue the slaves. In 1842 the owner of George Latimer was forced to sell him to antislavery sympathizers in Boston for far less than he was worth because the owner could find no safe place to keep Latimer while waiting for a hearing before a judge. In 1849 a slave owner from Kentucky lost his slaves when he was stopped by a mob outside South Bend, Indiana. The people of that city demanded a trial on the status of the blacks, and in the end the slaves went free. The master ultimately won a civil judgment against those who had helped his slaves escape, but it took years of litigation, and he never recovered the full value of the slaves he had lost. After the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), in which the Court upheld the 1793 law but found that the federal government could not force the states to implement it, some northern states prohibited their judicial or police officials from participating in the return of fugitive slaves.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was first proposed by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky in early 1850 as part of his omnibus compromise bill. Clay hoped to solve the crisis of the Union caused by slavery and the Mexican-American War with a huge compromise bill that would give various benefits to the North and the South. The bill included provisions to end the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and to bring California into the Union as a free state, both of which appealed to the North; to placate the South, it provided for opening newly acquired territories in the West to slavery and included a new fugitive slave law. Clay's bill failed, as southerners voted against it because of the admission of California and northerners opposed it because of the fugitive slave provision. However, after the single bill failed, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois guided its individual provisions through Congress as separate laws. On 18 September 1850 President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Bill into law.

The new law completely overhauled the return of fugitive slaves. It provided for the appointment of commissioners in every county of the United States to enforce the law. These commissioners could hold hearings and issue warrants and certificates of removal. More important, they could call on U.S. marshals and the U.S. military to enforce the law. The law also contained an admonition that all “good citizens” would agree to serve as deputies to enforce it, but this provision seemed to have no legal force. People actually interfering with the enforcement of the law, however, could be fined as much as one thousand dollars and jailed for six months. Hearings before U.S. commissioners were to be summary affairs, with the commissioner's only task to determine whether the person before him was, in fact, the person described in the claimant's documents. The alleged fugitive was not allowed to testify, and no jury was permitted to hear the case. The alleged fugitive was allowed to have an attorney, but only if he could hire one or one volunteered. Otherwise, the hearing would be conducted by the commissioner, and only the claimant or his agent or attorney could speak. The commissioners were to be paid by the claimants, receiving five dollars if they held against a claimant but ten dollars if they found in the claimant's favor and ordered the black returned to slavery. Northerners considered this a grotesque attempt to buy justice. Defenders of the law pointed out that when a commissioner ordered a fugitive returned to the South, he had to fill out a great deal of paperwork and was thus entitled to the extra compensation.

“Effects of the Fugitive-Slave-Law,” lithograph by Hoff and Bloede, New York, 1850. This image of black men being ambushed by armed whites speaks for itself, but some text was also provided: a passage from Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not deliver unto the master his servant which has escaped unto thee. . . . Thou shalt not oppress him”; and an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, beginning “We hold that all men are created equal.”

Library of Congress.

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The law led to a number of responses in the North. Thousands of fugitive slaves, and many free blacks, fled to Canada, fearful that they would either be returned to slavery or be falsely seized and made into slaves. Famous fugitives, like William and Ellen Craft (who had escaped when the light-skinned, slim Ellen pretended to be a young man seeking medical help in the North while William traveled with her as “his” servant) and Henry “Box” Brown (who had escaped to the North by being shipped in a crate as freight), fled to England after the passage of the law. Throughout the North blacks formed vigilance committees, vowing to resist slave catchers with violence. John Brown, who would later lead the famous raid at Harpers Ferry, was living in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the time. There he organized free blacks into the League of Gileadites to resist the law. The city council in Chicago denounced the law, declaring that it was void in the city. While having no effect on constitutional law, this resolution both illustrated northern hostility to the law and served as notice to slave catchers that they would not find the police or judges in Chicago sympathetic to their claims. The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, speaking in Boston, was more direct, declaring that the streets “would be running with blood” if the law was enforced.

Enforcement of the law produced mixed results. Census figures suggest that more than ten thousand fugitives were living in the North at the time the law was enacted and at least that many probably escaped in the period between the passage of the law and the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. Yet the best history of the enforcement of the law counted only 366 fugitives returned by the end of 1860. This was far more than all fugitive slaves returned from 1793 to 1850, but it hardly affected the loss of slaves that southerners felt, year in and year out. The political cost of these returns was also huge.

In 1851, the first full year of the law's enforcement, there were three major incidents of resistance to the law. In Boston a mob helped a fugitive slave named Shadrach escape from a courtroom. Federal officials later prosecuted three of his lawyers and an abolitionist activist, but those cases that went to trial ended in hung juries, and the government dropped charges against those who did not go to trial. Shadrach was never recovered. The rescue was mostly accomplished by Boston's black community, as more than thirty blacks came into the courtroom and overpowered the marshals. Some of those who rescued Shadrach were probably fugitives themselves. Shortly after the rescue scores of blacks left Boston.

On 11 September 1851 a Maryland slave owner, Edward Gorsuch, attempted to capture one of his slaves living in Christiana, Pennsylvania. Gorsuch arrived with relatives and deputy U.S. marshal Henry Kline. The slave he sought was at the home of William Parker, where a number of other fugitives lived. When Gorsuch and Kline arrived, Parker told them to leave. In addition, many whites and blacks from the neighborhood, led by Castner Hanway, who was white, warned Gorsuch and Kline to leave before they were harmed by the fugitives, who were determined to protect their liberty. These white bystanders refused to be deputized by Kline and ignored his demands that they help him subdue the fugitive slaves. Shortly afterward, guns were fired. Kline quickly fled, all of Gorsuch's relatives were wounded, and Gorsuch himself was killed. The next day Parker boldly took a train to Rochester, New York, where he visited Frederick Douglass and gave Douglass the pistol he had taken from Gorsuch. He then continued to Canada. Federal prosecutors indicted Hanway and forty other men—thirty-six blacks and five whites in all—for treason. After a two-week trial the U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert C. Grier, who presided over the trial while riding circuit, concluded that resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, while illegal, was not treason, and all of the indictments were dropped. This failed prosecution was a huge defeat for the Millard Fillmore administration, which hoped to make an example of those who resisted the new law.

On 1 October 1851, only weeks after the Christiana revolt, as it was called, the Fillmore administration tried to show that it could enforce the new law, arranging for the arrest of a fugitive named Jerry McHenry in Syracuse, New York, a city well known for its active and powerful antislavery community. The arrest took place while the state Liberty Party was having a convention in the city. The night of his arrest, a mob of as many as three thousand people charged the jail where Jerry was held, freeing him and, in the process, throwing a U.S. deputy marshal out a window. Leaders of the mob included the white abolitionists Samuel J. May and Gerrit Smith and the black ministers Jermain Loguen and Samuel Ringgold Ward. Jerry was soon taken to Canada.

A local grand jury indicted U.S. marshal Henry Allen for kidnapping, but the judge threw out the charge. The U.S. government indicted many of the rescuers, but most of the trials ended in acquittals or hung juries. The one man who was convicted, a black named Enoch Reed, died while his conviction was on appeal. A year later, Gerrit Smith was elected to Congress. Frederick Douglass later wrote that after the Jerry Rescue the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was a “dead letter” in Upstate New York, where thousands of fugitive slaves lived. Throughout the 1850s, and well after the Civil War, Syracuse would commemorate the rescue. At a celebration on 1 October 1884 Douglass recalled the heroism that had taken place thirty-four years earlier on that date, noting that along with the resistance at Christiana, the “rescue of Jerry did most to bring the fugitive slave bill into contempt and to defeat its execution everywhere.”

Douglass exaggerated in this 1884 speech, but only slightly. The law was enforced after 1851, and most seizures did not lead to rescues. But relatively few slaves were returned compared with the many thousands who had escaped, and many of the returns were both financially and politically costly. In 1851, shortly after the Shadrach rescue, authorities in Boston seized Thomas Sims, who had escaped from Savannah, Georgia. Immediately, the police surrounded the courthouse and ringed it with rope and anchor chains, offering a visible example of how the Fugitive Slave Law had “chained” northern justice. Abolitionists tried to persuade the Massachusetts chief justice, Lemuel Shaw, to issue a writ of habeas corpus for Sims, but Shaw refused to do so. So, too, did the U.S. district judge Peleg Sprague. Sims claimed that he was free and asked the U.S. commissioner George T. Curtis to delay the hearing until evidence of this could arrive from Georgia, but Curtis refused, claiming that if Sims were really free he could prove it when he arrived in Georgia. Under armed guard of more than one hundred deputies, Sims was removed from Boston in the middle of the night and placed on a ship bound for Georgia.

In 1854 the U.S. government used massive power to once again enforce the law in Boston, the center of antislavery activity in the North. Local police, working with federal authorities, arrested Anthony Burns on a false charge of theft. When he arrived at the courthouse, Burns saw his Virginia master and realized that he had been seized as a fugitive slave. The next day Burns was brought before a fugitive slave commissioner, Edward G. Loring, who began what he hoped would be a quick examination of the papers that Burns's owner, Charles Suttle, had brought with him. However, as the case was proceeding, a young lawyer and literary figure, Richard Henry Dana Jr., walked by the courtroom. Dana realized what was happening and quickly volunteered to defend Burns. The swift hearing Loring had hoped for turned into a week-long trial.

The next day a mob failed to rescue Burns, although a deputy marshal was killed in the attempt. Loring then ordered the U.S. Army and U.S. Marines to guard Burns. After a week of conflicting testimony, Loring ordered that Burns be returned to Virginia. Burns was removed under armed guard and taken out of the state on a coast guard cutter. The cost of this return was enormous. Counting the salaries of the deputies, soldiers, marines, and coast guardsmen used, it may have cost the United States as much as $100,000 to remove this one slave from Boston. Burns was later sold for about $1,200 and ultimately purchased by friends from Boston, who brought him back to the city as a free man. Loring was subsequently removed from his position as a county probate judge. Late in the decade he accepted a presidential appointment for a position in Washington, where he remained for the rest of his life, in exile from his native city and state.

Most fugitives who were seized were not defended by lawyers or rescued by mobs. It did not cost the government huge sums of money to return them to bondage. Nevertheless, there was enough resistance to the law to make southerners believe that no northerners would support it. In 1854 the abolitionist Sherman Booth rode through the streets of Milwaukee urging people to rescue the slave Joshua Glover, who had been seized by U.S. marshal Stephen Ableman. Booth was successful, and Glover was soon on his way to Canada. Ableman subsequently arrested Booth for violating the 1850 law. The Wisconsin Supreme Court then issued a writ of habeas corpus directing Ableman to release Booth. The Wisconsin court found the 1850 law to be unconstitutional. This led to a conflict between the state and federal courts. Ableman took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which asked the Wisconsin court for a record of the case. The Wisconsin court refused to cooperate in this matter, and thus for nearly four years the case was in limbo. Booth remained free, and the law remained unenforced. In 1858 the Wisconsin Supreme Court published its opinions in the Booth case, and the U.S. Supreme Court used these opinions as the basis for finally hearing the case. In Ableman v. Booth (1859) the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1850 law, and Ableman rearrested Booth. Shortly afterward, a mob rescued Booth from prison, but after many months Ableman once again caught Booth and held him in jail until President James Buchanan freed him on his last day in office, in March 1861. The conflict between the Wisconsin court and the U.S. government illustrates the anger that the 1850 law caused in the North.

A case similar to that of Booth arose in Ohio in September 1858, in the aftermath of what became known as the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. When authorities seized a fugitive slave named John Bacon in Wellington, Ohio, the students and faculty from nearby Oberlin College rushed to the courthouse and rescued him. In December a federal grand jury indicted thirty-seven men for the rescue, although more than two hundred were involved. The first trial, of Simeon Bushnell, did not begin until May 1859 and lasted ten days. Bushnell was convicted, sentenced to sixty days in jail, and fined six hundred dollars plus court costs. The prosecutor then attempted to try the black activist Charles Langston with the same jury, but Langston's attorneys successfully resisted. Langston was ultimately tried in late June with a new federal jury. At that rate it would have taken more than a year to try all the defendants and would have cost more than twenty thousand dollars.

While these trials were proceeding, the defendants refused to post bail, thus filling the limited jail facilities in Cleveland. While the federal prosecutors were proceeding against the rescuers, the county indicted the slave catcher, another Kentuckian, and two federal deputies for kidnapping under an Ohio law. At the same time, Langston and Bushnell appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, urging it to issue a writ of habeas corpus against the federal marshal on the ground that the 1850 law was unconstitutional. By a 3-to-2 vote, the Ohio Supreme Court refused to challenge the federal government, as the Wisconsin court had done in Ableman v. Booth. Although Ohio avoided a crisis in federalism, hostility to the 1850 act did not abate. After the Ohio court's decision, the parties reached a compromise. All defendants pled guilty and received ten-dollar fines, except Langston and Bushnell, who were fined one hundred dollars.

In 1860 abolitionists in Ohio and Illinois were convicted under the law for rescuing fugitive slaves. One of those jailed was the Reverend George Gordon, the president of Iberia College. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln pardoned him. John Hossack, who rescued a fugitive slave in Illinois, did not need a pardon. The judge, sensitive to public sentiment, sentenced Hossack to only ten days in jail and fine of one hundred dollars. These cases illustrate once more the pervasive hostility to the law.

On the eve of the Civil War, the Supreme Court decided Kentucky v. Dennison (1861), its last case involving fugitive slaves. This was the case of a free black from Ohio, Willis Lago, who had helped a slave woman named Charlotte escape to Ohio from Kentucky. Kentucky authorities did not seek the slave woman—they knew that would be hopeless and beyond the power of the Ohio government. Instead, in 1859 Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky sent an official extradition requisition to Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, asking that Lago be returned to Kentucky to face charges of theft. He was accused of stealing a slave. Chase was an abolitionist who had defended many whites in fugitive slave cases. Not surprisingly, he refused to extradite Lago, on the ground that he had not committed a crime recognized by Ohio. Magoffin waited until Chase left office and in 1860 sought extradition from the new governor, William Dennison, but he, too, refused to send Lago to Kentucky. Magoffin then sought a writ of mandamus from the Supreme Court to force Dennison to deliver Lago for prosecution.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ultimately sided with Ohio, but not because he liked the state's antislavery position—on the contrary, he castigated Ohio for refusing to return a slave stealer to Kentucky. But Taney also refused to order a state governor to act in this case, asserting that such an order would violate the nature of federalism. Taney concluded that “there is no power delegated to the General Government, either through the Judicial Department or any other department, to use any coercive means to compel him.” Decided less than two weeks before Abraham Lincoln took office, and with seven states already having declared they were no longer in the Union, Taney's opinion was a response to the secession crisis. Taney did not to give any power to Lincoln to coerce the states if a civil war did occur.

In 1864 Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. By then it had long been a dead letter, killed off by secession and civil war. The failure of the North to support this law was one of the reasons southern states gave for leaving the Union. The law itself helped galvanize northern opposition to slavery and helped lead northerners into the party of Lincoln. The victory of that party was the immediate cause of secession.

In 1883 Frederick Douglass noted that in the 1850s “we contended that the [fugitive slave] bill was … unconstitutional; but our arguments were laughed to scorn” by the Supreme Court. “We were told the intention of the Constitution was to enable masters to recapture their slavery,” Douglass recalled, “and that law of Ninety-three and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 were constitutional.” This was the state of things “while slavery was the base line of American society, while it ruled the church and the state, while it was the interpreter of our law and the exponent of our religion.” It was against this law that Douglass and thousands of other northerners struggled in the 1850s. Indeed, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, more than any other piece of legislation, exposed the power of slavery over the nation. The law denied even the most basic legal protections to blacks—whether fugitives or free people—who were seized as fugitive slaves. It symbolized the power of slavery by denying the alleged slave even the right to speak at his own hearing. Along with the Dred Scott decision, the 1850 law stood for the proposition that America was indeed a slaveholder's republic.

See also Ableman v. Booth (Sherman Booth Case); Burns, Anthony, Trial of; Brown, Henry “Box”; Brown, John; Christiana Incident; Clay, Henry; Compromise of 1850; Douglas, Stephen A.; Dred Scott Case; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Jerry Rescue; Loguen, Jermain Wesley; May, Samuel J.; Slave Trade, Domestic; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Smith, Gerrit; Supreme Court; Taney, Roger B.; and Ward, Samuel Ringgold.

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