Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

Boston poster from 1851 warning escaped slaves that with the help of the police they could be returned to their previous owners.

The Fugitive Slave Law , also known as the Fugitive Slave Act , was a US federal law that forced the executive branch of the northern states to return runaway slaves to their owners in the southern states . The law was passed by Congress on September 18, 1850. It was part of an attempted compromise between the northern and southern states and one of the most controversial parts of this compromise package. In the northern states it increased the fear of a conspiratorial conspiracy of the slave-holding southern states.

There was great protest within the black population in the north and the abolitionist movement against the law, most of which were directed against President Millard Fillmore , who signed the law, and Foreign Secretary Daniel Webster , who was in favor of slavery . Abolitionists disparagingly called the law the Bloodhound Law . There were solidarity campaigns and the liberation of captured slaves who had fled. The Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated Act 1854 in a trial for a release from prisoners for violating the Constitution. However, the United States Supreme Court declared the Wisconsin decision inadmissible in 1859 ( Ableman v. Booth ).

Ultimately, the law was rarely applied in the northern states. A number of northern states, as far as possible, issued additional ordinances which, for example, required a jury to rule whether someone was actually an escaped slave. Other states prohibited escaped slaves from being detained in local prisons in order to organize their repatriation. For all escaped slaves who had settled in the northern states, however, the law threatened their very existence. Many of them fled further north - not least with the help of the Underground Railroad - and settled in Canada .

literature

• Stanley W. Campbell: The Slave Catchers. Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. 1850-1860 . Norton & Company, New York NY 1970, ISBN 0-393-00626-3 .
• Don E. Fehrenbacher: The Slaveholding Republic. An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery . Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 2002, ISBN 0-19-803247-1 .
• John Hope Franklin , Loren Schweninger: Runaway Slaves. Rebels on the Plantation . Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 1999, ISBN 0-19-508449-7 .

Web links

Wikisource: Fugitive Slave Act  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States , Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 181
2. ^ Nevins, Allen (1947 / August 1992). Ordeal of the Union: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847-1852 1. Collier Books. ISBN 002035441X . ISBN 978-0020354413
3. ↑ wisconsinhistory.org: Booth, Sherman Miller 1812-1904