Fugitive slave law

“ If this Fugitive Slave law continues for a single year, I hope every free state will pass a law inflicting condign punishment upon every man who directly or indirectly assists in sending any man into southern bondage, unless he can prove before a jury that the man so sent was a slave. ”

“ The laws of other states, so-called, have never operated to release a single fugitive slave, and may be regarded simply as a protest of those states against the harsh features of the fugitive slave law. ”

“ This religious paper says,—"To the fugitives themselves ... this Law is no Law ... and to resist it even unto death, is their right, and it may be their duty.... To each individual fugitive, to every man or woman, who having escaped from bondage and tasted liberty, is in hourly peril of being seized and dragged back to slavery, we say,—Be fully prepared for your own defense. If to you death seems better than slavery, then refuse not to die—whether on the way-side, at your own threshold, or even as a felon upon the gallows. ”

“ It has been most wickedly asserted by our proslavery presses and our proslavery politicians, that the surrender of fugitives from labor and fugitives from justice are similar proceedings. The surrender of a fugitive slave involves two questions, that of identity and that of property; and the law makes the decision of the commissioner on both points final and conclusive upon every State and Federal court in the land. The surrender of a fugitive criminal involves only the question of personal identity. ”

“ It is doubtful if the Fugitive Slave Law ever found a more skillful defender. The spirit in which he met his critics was admirably calculated to disarm prejudice. Come and let us reason together, was his plea. Without any attempt to ignore the most obnoxious parts of the act, he passed directly to the discussion of the clauses which apparently denied the writ of habeas corpus and trial by jury to the fugitive from service. ”

“ Nor is it true, that the fugitive slave is made an "outlaw," and on that ground justifiable for bloody and murderous resistance of Law. He is under the protection of Law; and if any man injures him or kills him, the Law will avenge him, just as soon as it would you or me. He is not made an outlaw: common sense knows better. ”

“ By the Fugitive Slave Bill, we are forbidden to shelter or assist the forlornest stranger who ever appealed for sympathy or aid. We are required by absolute law to shut out every feeling of compassion for suffering humanity. Fines and imprisonment impend over us, for exercising one of the holiest charities of our religion. Virtue and humanity are legislated into crime. Let us meet the issue like men! Let us assert our utter abhorrence of all human laws, that compel us to violate the common law of humanity and justice ”

“ There is not the slightest historical evidence, that at the time the constitution was adopted, any one supposed that it imposed a duty on the people of the Free States, to become active in seizing upon and transporting back fugitive slaves.—Or that they designed to furnish slaveholders with any protection against any of the numerous dangers to which that peculiar species of property is always exposed, other than the one specifically named, that is, the discharge from service or labor by the law of the State, or a legal hindrance to his taking the slave away. ”

“ The Fugitive Slave Act.
Few laws have ever been passed better calculated than this to harden the heart and benumb the conscience of every man who assists in its execution. It pours contempt upon the dictates of justice and humanity. It levels in the dust the barriers erected by the common law for the protection of personal liberty. Its victims are native born Americans, uncharged with crime. ”

“ So it seems the slave-catchers had formerly no difficulty in finding a magistrate among hundreds to aid them, but that now, before they hunt a slave, they must hunt and catch a United States judge, or a commissioner of six or eight in a whole State. Truly a hard case, and yet the slaveholders themselves set the very trap in which they have been caught, and thus it is that, through their folly, and your generosity in not pointing out to them the blunder they were committing, the new law is more favorable to the fugitive than the old one. ”

“ They have heard of the buying and selling of men, women and children, without any regard to the tenderest ties of nature; of the passage and execution of the infamous Fugitive Slave Law; and, as we walk through the streets of London, they occasionally meet an American slave, who reminds them of the fact that while their countrymen are boasting of their liberty, and offering an asylum to the exiled of other countries, they refuse it to their own citizens. ”

“ It was at the [Pg 450] time of the passage of that infamous Fugitive Slave Law, when freedmen and runaways like William Parker, Jerry McHenry and Joshua Glover were knocked down, beaten, bound and cast into prison; when abolitionists were incarcerated for their anti-slavery propaganda and giving aid to the fugitives; when even our valiant Frederick Douglass admitted himself too timid to support any such project as that undertaken by Miss Miner in the city of Washington. ”

“ Seward did not hesitate to publish similar sentiments. "Christendom," he wrote, "might be searched in vain for a parallel to the provisions which make escape from bondage a crime, and which, under vigorous penalties, compel freemen to aid in the capture of slaves." [124] The Albany Evening Journal declared that "the execution of the fugitive slave law violently convulses the foundations of society. Fugitives who have lived among us for many years cannot be seized and driven off as if they belonged to the brute creation. The attempt to recover such fugitives will prove abortive." ”

“ I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so. We must not withhold an efficient Fugitive Slave law, because the Constitution requires us, as I understand it, not to withhold such a law. But we must prevent the outspreading of the institution, because neither the Constitution nor general welfare requires us to extend it. We must prevent the revival of the African slave trade, and the enacting by Congress of a Territorial slave code. ”

“ The general significance of the long controversy in regard to fugitive slaves can best be understood by tracing the development as a sectional issue of the question at the bottom of it, namely, the obligation to restore fugitives to their masters. The creation of a line dividing the free North from the slaveholding South in the early years of our national history, and the enactment of the first Fugitive Slave Law, by which the general government assumed a certain responsibility for runaways, led to the opening of the question. ”

“ Away with such morality! encouraging a juror to violate his oath, by disregarding the Law, which he has just sworn to his country and to his God, shall govern his verdict! and encouraging a fugitive to expect him to do so!—We may yet see whether the jurymen of our country will regard their oath, or will follow the religious counsel of this religious paper.
I am not justifying slavery. I am pleading obedience to the texts before me. Slavery may be wrong. Be it so; there is still a righteous method to get rid of it. But if slavery is wrong, that does not make violence and murder right. ”

“ If two highwaymen agreed between themselves to stand by each other in robbing helpless men, women and children, should we not find it hard work to "conquer our prejudices" so far as to dignify their bargain with the name of law? That is the light in which the compact between North and South presents itself to the minds of intelligent slaves, and we should view it in the same way, if we were in their position. Law was established to maintain justice between man and man; and this Act clearly maintains injustice. Law was instituted to protect the weak from the strong ”

“ Leaving the provisions of a former law relating to fugitive slaves in full force, we now decree that hereafter, whoever shelters a fugitive slave belonging to another, shall immediately subject him to a judicial examination, even though he should assert that he is freeborn, in order that it may be ascertained whether he is a freeman or a slave, and should he prove to be a slave, that he may be returned to his master. ”

“ But there is one distinction which is broad enough and luminous enough to make a blind man see it. An alleged fugitive from justice is not adjudged to be a criminal previous to delivery, nor is he made a criminal, in the eye of the law, by the act of delivery. But the alleged fugitive from service is adjudged a slave, and made a slave by the certificate of the commissioner. The state receiving a fugitive from justice does not proceed forthwith to punish him. ”

“ Judge Denning, of Illinois, discharged a negro brought before him as a fugitive slave, on the ground that the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional.
Two alleged slaves arrested at Columbia, Penn., on warrant of United States Commissioner McAllister,—claimed as property of W.T. McDermott, of Baltimore. One was carried into slavery, one escaped. (November, 1851.)
Near New Philadelphia, Maryland, a woman, married to a free colored man, with whom she had lived ten years, was arrested as the slave of a Mr. Shreve, of Louisville, Kentucky. She was taken back to Kentucky. ”

“ If the framers of the Constitution had meant that Congress should have power to pass a law for delivering up fugitives "held to service or labor," they would have inserted a clause delegating such power, as they did in the compact concerning "public acts and records." ”

“ He was fined fifty dollars and to be imprisoned one hour, and the government to pay the costs.—-Chicago Tribune.
A Proposition for Kidnapping, on a large scale, was made by John H. Pope, "police officer and constable," in a letter dated "Frederick, Maryland, United States of America, January 1, 1855," and addressed to Mr. Hays, Sheriff of Montreal, Canada. "Vast numbers of slaves," says Mr. Pope, "escaping from their masters or owners, succeed in reaching your Provinces, and are, therefore, without the pale of the 'Fugitive Slave Law,' and can only be restored by cunning, together with skill. ”

“ It allowed the owner of the slave, his agent or attorney, to seize the fugitive and take him before any judge of a United States Circuit or District Court, or any local magistrate.78 The only requirement for the conviction of the slave was the testimony of his master, or the affidavit of some magistrate in the State from which he came, certifying that such a person had escaped. Hindering arrest or harboring a slave was punishable by a fine of five hundred dollars. The law thus established a system allowing the greatest harshness to the slave and every favor to the master. ”

“ All molestation of the claimant, in the removal of his slave, "by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other person whomsoever," to be prevented.
SECT. 7. Any person obstructing the arrest of a fugitive, or attempting his or her rescue, or aiding him or her to escape, or harboring and concealing a fugitive, knowing him to be such, shall be subject to a fine of not exceeding one thousand dollars, and to be imprisoned not exceeding six months, and shall also "forfeit and pay the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost." ”

“ When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling men to catch their fellows more brutally than runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic, unrepublican Canada, still stretched her arms to those who might reach tier. But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex. Right where we are, there we must dig our trenches, and win or die. ”

“ It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law. ”

“ In England, he said, slavery could exist only by positive law; and in default of such law there was no legal machinery for depriving a man of his liberty on the ground that he was a slave. The importance of the case for the colonies lay not in the assertion of the principle that slavery depended on positive law, for the American statute-books were full of positive law on slavery; the precedent thus established determined the future course of England against the delivery of fugitives, whether from her colonies or from other countries.43
§ 13. ”

“ Governor Bell refused, on the ground that Ohio laws did not recognize property in man.185
Prosecutions. Act of 1850.
§ 49. Prosecutions.—The effects of the aid and protection thus given fugitives by Northern people or governments awakened among the slaveholders a feeling of wrong and indignation. The Fugitive Slave Law was clear, and they determined to carry it out to the letter. They began, therefore, energetically to prosecute people for aiding and harboring escaping slaves. The case just mentioned shows how difficult it was to secure prosecutions beyond the State boundaries. ”

“ As a political question there could be no difference of opinion among us on the subject. But our duty is found in the Constitution of the Union, as construed by the Supreme Court. The fugitives from labour we are bound, by the highest obligations, to deliver up on claim of the master being made; and there is no State power which can release the slave from the legal custody of his master. "In regard to the arrest of fugitives from labour, the law does not impose active duties on our citizens generally. They are not prohibited from exercising the ordinary charities of life towards the fugitive. ”