The Slave Catchers

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860

Stanley W. Campbell

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780807896327, 9780807811412
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610078
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In this thoroughly researched documentation of a historically controversial issue, the author considers the background, passage, and constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. The author's relation of public opinion and the executive policy regarding the much disputed law will help the reader reach a decision as to whether the law was actually a success or failure, legally and socially.

Originally published in 1970.

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Chapter I
Background and Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law

In Washington, the nation’s capital, the spring and summer of 1850 were long, hot, and trying for members of the Thirty-first Congress. Questions of great importance to the Union were being debated both in and out of Congress during that session, and men, tempers already short from protracted and intemperate discussions of seemingly insoluble problems, were becoming irascible. Men of good will from all sections of the country had reached an apparent impasse in the controversies over such problems as the admission of California into the Union as a free state, extension of slavery into the territories, organization of the territory recently acquired from Mexico, the Texas boundary dispute, abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and a more effective law for the reclamation of fugitive slaves. A great part of the southern minority, sensing the majority was hostile to it, felt that the section had its back against the wall and must now resist. Talk of disunion was rife among certain groups of Southerners, and, although many Northerners scoffed at the idea, there were men in the North who would have rejoiced to see the slave states withdraw from the Union. Extremist elements from neither section were dominant in Congress, but a potentially dangerous crisis had developed which would require the utmost in statesmanship to allay.

The leadership of President Zachary Taylor was faltering, but there were men in the United States Senate with sufficient knowledge of statecraft to steer the nation through this perilous moment, notably Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Stephen Arnold Douglas. When Clay rose to address the Senate on January 29, he must have been aware that to overcome the challenge confronting the nation’s lawmakers would require consumate political skill. “In his blandest mood, with a conciliatory gleam playing over his visage,” wrote Allan Nevins, “Clay came now not to plead, but to direct; not to defer to the Administration, but to force it to take a truly national stand; not to conciliate individuals, but to marshal groups and interests into an irresistible phalanx.”¹

The plan which Clay presented to the Senate was simple enough. It consisted of eight steps which incorporated the ideas of separate bills, most of which had already been introduced by Senator Douglas, the chairman of the Committee on Territories. Clay proposed: (1) that California should be admitted to the Union as a free state; (2) that, as slavery was “not likely to be introduced into the territory” acquired from Mexico, governments should be established there “without the adoption of any restriction or condition on the subject of slavery”; (3) that the western boundary of the state of Texas should be drawn to exclude “any portion of New Mexico”; (4) that the public debt of Texas contracted prior to annexation be assumed by the government of the United States; (5) that without the consent of Maryland and just compensation to the owners, it would be “inexpedient” to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; (6) that it would be “expedient,” however, to abolish the slave trade in the District; (7) that a more effective fugitive slave law ought to be passed; and (8) that Congress had no power to prohibit the slave trade between the states. In “fairness and candor,” said Clay in conclusion, “I now ask every Senator ... to examine the plan of accomodation which this series of resolutions proposes, and not to pronounce against them until convinced after a thorough examination.”² With that statement he sat down. The road to compromise had been opened, but it would be September before the deep-seated differences could be adjusted to the satisfaction of a majority in the Congress.

Only the seventh of Clay’s resolutions which called for the passage of a more effective fugitive slave law will be evaluated here. It must be remembered, however, that the Fugitive Slave Law was only a part of the Compromise of 1850. To some extent, the vehement demands for effective enforcement can be accounted for in that many Southerners felt the Fugitive Slave Law was the only concession made to the South. “This law,” wrote the editor of De Bow’s Review, “was the only ‘tub thrown to the whale of the South, out of the whole series of compromise measures. . . .’”³ The South was particularly anxious for the law to be enforced. In fact, by December 1850, “faithful execution” of the Fugitive Slave Law was to become the fifth plank of the Georgia Platform upon which “the preservation of our much loved Union” rested.⁴ If the solemn compact embodied in the compromise were breached by the North, the South would no longer be bound by it. During the debates on Clay’s resolutions, southern advocates of compromise made it exceedingly clear that the successful adjustment of the problems arising from the slavery question depended upon the passage of an effective, stringent, enforceable law for reclaiming fugitive slaves.

The history of the fugitive slave problem from the adoption of the Constitution to the Compromise of 1850 provides ample evidence that the demands of the South for a more rigorous law were not unreasonable. Southern claims were based upon the Constitution of the United States. It explicitly provided that “No person held to service or labor 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 labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party, to whom such service or labor may be due.”⁵Demands for a more stringent law were widespread in the South, but the states of the Deep South lost fewer slaves to the North than the four border states of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. In fact, these four states proclaimed a greater annual loss than all the remaining southern states.⁶ But there was practically no agreement on the annual loss of absconding slaves. The Louisville Journal reported that the state of Kentucky lost thirty thousand dollars worth of slave property to the North each year.⁷ Senator James Murray Mason believed Virginia was losing slaves to the value of one hundred thousand dollars a year; Senator Thomas George Pratt asserted that Maryland suffered an annual loss of eighty thousand dollars, while South Carolina’s Andrew Pickens Butler estimated the annual loss of slaves from all the southern states to be in excess of two hundred thousand dollars.⁸ According to the United States Census, the number of slaves reported as having escaped into the free states in 1850 was 1,011, or about one in each 3,165 of the slave population.⁹

Southerners were convinced that one of the principal causes of the fugitive slave problem was the activities of abolitionists in the North. Public meetings, at which fugitive Negroes were openly exhibited, had become a common occurrence. Antislavery leaders in the North and Northwest took advantage of every opportunity to declaim against the institution of slavery. Moreover, the activity of the antislavery societies was not confined by geographical limits. “The fact is notorious and undeniable,” reported a special committee of the Virginia legislature, appointed to investigate the effectiveness of existing legislation for reclaiming runaway slaves, “that their emissaries have penetrated into the very hearts of the slaveholding states, and aided the escape of slaves whom they had seduced from the service of their owners.”¹⁰ Abolitionist newspapers, such as the Liberator in Boston, flaunted the Constitution and railed against slaveholders as agents of the devil. In some of the northern states, vigilance committees were formed to give aid and succor to Negroes who had fled their masters and to make it as difficult as possible for the owners of slaves to reclaim their property. The New York State Vigilance Anti-Slavery Committee, for example, reported that in 1849 it assisted 151 fugitives in escaping from servitude.¹¹ Describing the “war of ambition against the South,” the Virginia legislative committee reported:

Fugitive slaves were harbored and protected, vexatious suits and prosecutions were instituted against the owner or his agent, resulting sometimes in imprisonment for want of bail, irresponsible mobs, composed of fanatics, ruffians and fugitive slaves, who had already found asylum abroad, were permitted by local authorities to rescue recaptured slaves in the lawful custody of their masters, and to imprison, beat, wound and even put to death citizens of the United States, seeking to enforce by lawful proceedings, the rights guaranteed to them by the constitution.¹²

The first Fugitive Slave Law had been passed by Congress in 1793. Before that date, the southern states had relied upon the good faith of those states which were freeing their bondsmen to live up to the compromises of the Constitution. Initially, it was thought that the presence of this class of persons in the free states would provide ample motivation for the white majority in northern communities to cooperate with the slaveholders in recapturing their runaways. “For it was to be expected,” said the report of Virginia’s legislative committee, “that the enlightened and sagacious people of the North would see at a glance, that the violation of that compact would create, and continually recruit on their soil, a class of paupers like the Parias of Hindostan; of outcasts from society; of men who are neither slaves nor citizens; a wen on the body politic; an anomaly on their institutions, and a pestilent curse to them and their posterity.”¹³

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 did not result from a complaint of the South for legislation on this subject; it grew incidentally from a call for remedial statutes to facilitate the surrender of fugitives from justice. A free Negro residing in Pennsylvania had been captured by three white men and taken to Virginia. The three white men were charged with kidnapping, and the governor of Pennsylvania attempted to have them extradited. On the ground that there was no statute providing for the rendition of fugitives from justice, the governor of Virginia refused to comply with the request of her sister state. Unable to obtain satisfactory cooperation from Virginia, the governor of Pennsylvania presented the facts of the case to President George Washington who relayed them to the Congress. The result was passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. The first two sections of this law concerned the surrender of fugitives from justice, and the last two sections pertained to the rendition of fugitive slaves.¹⁴

In light of experience and a hostile public opinion in the North, Southerners found many weaknesses in this law. The law provided that the slave owner could apply to a district or circuit judge of the United States for a certificate to enable him to return his slave to the state from which he had fled. However, at the time the law was passed, many states had only one district judge, and the circuit judges were resident in only nine states. With the fugitive slave in tow, extensive travel and expense were usually necessary before a slave’s owner came under the protection of the federal courts. The law did not authorize federal judges to issue a warrant for the arrest of the fugitive slave, nor did it permit the slaveholder to demand of federal marshals aid in the pursuit of their fugitive property. In Virginia, it was noted that before the law could operate

the master ... a stranger, must go into a free state, seize his slave without form or process of law, and unaccompanied by a single civil officer, must carry that slave, in the face of a fanatical and infuriated population, perhaps from the centre of extremists of the state, a distance of two or three hundred miles to the place where the judge may happen to reside, before he can have any legal or judicial action in his case; and suppose that he had passed through the almost insuperable barriers incident to such an undertaking, and had succeeded in bringing his slave before the judge, and had obtained the certificate which the law prescribes, there is no provision in that law by which the judgment can be enforced, or the power of the national government be invoked, through its marshals and officers, to sustain the rights of property thus adjudicated in his favor.¹⁵

As antislavery sentiment in the North became more intense, opposition to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 became more pronounced. When active contravention by extremist elements had made the law a virtual dead letter in certain northern communities, southern congressmen attempted to secure a more effective law for the reclamation of fugitive slaves. In December, 1817, James Pindall of Virginia, Philemon Beecher of Ohio, and Richard C. Anderson of Kentucky were appointed to a committee in the House of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Slave Catchers
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Chapter I Background and Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law
• Chapter II The Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
• Chapter III The Fugitive Slave Law and Public Opinion, 1850–1854
• Chapter IV The Fugitive Slave Law and Public Opinion, 1854–1860
• Chapter V Executive Policy and the Fugitive Slave Law
• Chapter VI Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860
• Chapter VII Non-Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law: Slave Rescues, 1850–1860
• Chapter VIII The Personal Liberty Laws and Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law
• Chapter IX The Fugitive Slave Law: From Secession to Repeal*
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index