The Second Fugitive Slave Law, aimed at making the rendition of captured fugitive slaves from northern states easier for southern slaveholders, exacerbated tensions between the North and South and contributed to the developments that eventually led to the U.S. Civil War.
In September, 1850, the U.S. Congress
Slave escapes had been common long before the United States became an independent country. It was the decision of the northern states following the Revolutionary War (1775-1783)
Contemporary lithograph depicting the horrors of slave-catching. At the lower left is a quote from the Book of Deuteronomy forbidding the returning of escaping servants to their masters.
This clause established the constitutional basis for fugitive slave laws.
Several events during the 1840’s prompted southern whites to intensify demands for a stronger fugitive slave law. First, the number of slave escapes increased as the slave labor system in the border slave states weakened. Second, a few black and white abolitionists became active in helping slaves escape. Third, northern states began passing “personal liberty laws” requiring jury trials to determine the status of African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves. Such trials provided protection to those falsely accused and also made it more difficult for masters to reclaim actual escapees.
The Supreme Court
When Mason’s much-amended bill became law nine months later, it appeared to be all that southern whites demanded. It provided that United States marshals had to assist masters in arresting fugitive slaves and that the marshals could, in turn, summon northern citizens to help. It provided that United States circuit courts appoint numerous commissioners who were empowered to evaluate the truth of a master’s claim and authorize the return of fugitives to a master’s state. Accused fugitives were not permitted to testify before the commissioners. The commissioners would receive a fee of ten dollars if they accepted a master’s claim and only five dollars if they did not. Anyone who interfered with the apprehension of alleged fugitive slaves or who helped such persons escape was subject to a fine of up to one thousand dollars and imprisonment for up to six months.
To many northerners, the new law seemed to be excessively harsh and corrupting. Even northerners who expressed no opposition to slavery in the South had little enthusiasm for assisting in the rendition of fugitive slaves. The denial to the accused of the right to testify, of the writ of habeas corpus
To abolitionists, who opposed the very existence of slavery and encouraged slaves to escape, and to antislavery politicians, who contended that the South was seeking to expand its slave system into the North, the new law was anathema. The law’s harshness and its apparent invasion of northern states’ rights led less committed northerners to oppose it as well. Even as the bill that became the Second Fugitive Slave Law made its way through Congress, antislavery senators Salmon P. Chase
In many instances, however, enforcement was difficult. As soon as the law went into effect, African Americans escaping from the South went to Canada,
Most striking, both black and white people physically resisted enforcement of the law throughout the 1850’s. Shortly after the law went into effect, former slave Harriet Tubman,
Although the law was peacefully enforced in large regions of the North, its most important effect was to widen the gulf between the North and South. Many northerners considered the law to be unconstitutional and an immoral southern aggression, in behalf of an oppressive institution, upon not only African Americans but also the rights and values of northern whites. White southerners, many of whom had predicted that the new Fugitive Slave Law would be ineffective, regarded northern resistance to it as another sign of antipathy toward the South and its institutions. What had been designed as part of a compromise to quiet sectional animosities, instead increased those animosities and helped lead the nation into civil war
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Brandt, Nat. The Town That Started the Civil War. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Analyzes events related to the Oberlin-Wellington fugitive slave rescue of 1859, one of the more famous instances of violent resistance to the Second Fugitive Slave Law. -
Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Discusses the background, constitutionality, and northern reaction to the Second Fugitive Slave Law, as well as its enforcement. -
Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. A detailed biography that places Tubman’s life within the context of the abolitionist movement and the South of the nineteenth century. -
Hamilton, Holman. Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850. New York: W. W. Norton, 1964. Places the Second Fugitive Slave Law in the context of a broader discussion of the Compromise of 1850. -
Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. Completed and edited by Don. E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A thorough political history of the era during which the Second Fugitive Slave Law was passed and enforced. -
Slaughter, Thomas P. Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Places the Christiana riot, one example of violent resistance to the Second Fugitive Slave Law, in the broader context of white racism and African American poverty.
Underground Railroad Flourishes
Compromise of 1850
Stowe Publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Congress Passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act
Last Slave Ship Docks at Mobile
U.S. Civil War
Lincoln Issues the Emancipation Proclamation
First Underground Railroad Opens in London
Reconstruction of the South
Salmon P. Chase; Frederick Douglass; Charlotte Forten; William Lloyd Garrison; William H. Seward; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Roger Brooke Taney; Harriet Tubman; Daniel Webster.