The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 allowed slave owners to recapture runaway slaves, with the federal government’s assistance, and denied slaves legal rights. Northern states resisted the law, leading to conflict and contributing to the outbreak of the Civil War. The law became meaningless after the war and the passage of the 13th amendment.
The Fugitive Slave Law was enacted in the United States in 1850 following the passage of a related act by the United States Congress. As part of the Compromise of 1850 between the antislavery Northern and pro-slavery Southern contingents in the United States, the new law referenced an existing 1793 law that gave slaveowners the right to enter another state and recapture their slaves. runaway slaves who had previously belonged to them. Under the law, it was the federal government’s responsibility to help the owners recapture these slaves, who were denied any legal means to try to fight their return to slavery. After the Fugitive Slave Act led to much conflict between Northern abolitionists and Southern slave owners in the 1850s, the outbreak of the American Civil War early the next decade essentially rendered the law meaningless.
Up until the 1850s, the laws on fugitive slaves who had fled to the North were extremely vague. A 1793 law guaranteed that slave owners could cross state lines and take back their slaves, all while denying captured slaves basic rights such as habeas corpus, jury trial, or the right to testify on their behalf. Northern states reacted by enacting personal liberty laws that granted these rights to former slaves. An 1842 United States Supreme Court ruling in a fugitive slave case held that a slave owner’s rights superseded these personal liberty laws, but also ruled that a state must not cooperate in any way with the recapture of fugitive slaves , deeming it a federal liability.
One of the provisions Southern politicians argued was needed to be included in the Compromise of 1850 was a stronger fugitive slave law. What Congress passed that year charged US marshals with assisting slave owners in recapturing runaway slaves. He also placed the burden of proof on slaves to prove they were not fugitives, even as he denied them basic legal rights to actually do so. All that was needed for a slave owner to prove that the man in question was his former slave was an affidavit from a Southern state court or the testimony of white witnesses.
Many Northern states continued to house runaway slaves and went to great lengths to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act. The famed underground railroad of antislavery sympathizers helped deliver many of these former slaves to friendly Northern states or even Canada. There was even armed conflict between those protecting slaves and owners and federal personnel demanding their return. Bitterness over the law increased animosity between the North and South which led to civil war.
When the American Civil War began in 1861, northern states that claimed they were obligated to a higher law simply ignored the fugitive slave law. They legally justified this response by stating that since they were at war with the South, fugitive slaves were part of that war’s contraband and did not need to be returned. All slaves gained their freedom at the conclusion of the war following the passage of the 13th amendment to the US Constitution.
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