The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
The North ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The Law ◽  
Upper South

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, although in effect less than two decades, was one of the nation’s most controversial federal laws. Designed to provide southern slaveholders with greater assistance in the return of runaway slaves, it angered northern whites and blacks, divided communities, and yet still failed to assuage slaveholders’ concerns. Designed to calm sectional tensions as part of the Compromise of 1850, the law propelled the nation closer to war. Both the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 affirmed the rights of slaveholders to claim enslaved people who escaped into free states or territories. But enslaved people continued to seek freedom, and over time the number of those willing to aid them grew, eventually developing into the loosely organized network known as the Underground Railroad. Slaveholders, especially in the Upper South, annually lost an untold number of slaves to escape. Not all freedom-seekers were successful, but the costs were great nonetheless. To slaveholders, every escaped slave who made it North represented a loss of hundreds of dollars, and perhaps more importantly, spurred others to follow in his or her footsteps. Often associated with states’ rights ideology, white southerners demanded and eventually got what some scholars have called the greatest exercise of federal power before the Civil War. The enhanced federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 expanded on the earlier law in several important ways. It created a new position of commissioner who was appointed, not elected, and was paid ten dollars each time he sent an accused fugitive into slavery, only five dollars if he found the claim to be insufficient and ordered the accused released. The act also strengthened the penalties for helping fugitives escape or interfering with rendition; it explicitly stripped all rights from the accused; and stated that bystanders could be called upon to assist in slave recapture. Response to the law varied. Enslaved people continued to escape bondage. Fugitives living in the North and even free blacks felt threatened and organized for self-defense; thousands left for Canada. Abolitionists, black and white, protested in writing and speeches; some engaged in bold rescues of individuals claimed as fugitives. Many white northerners abided by the law, although for others the idea of being turned into de facto slave catchers pushed them toward opposition. Rather than settle the issue of fugitive slaves, the Law served to divide the nation further.

“Design His Course to Mexico”

2018 ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Mekala Audain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The U.S

In the mid-1850s, Texas slaveholders estimated that some 4,000 fugitive slaves had escaped south to Mexico. This chapter broadly examines the process in which runaway slaves from Texas escaped to Mexico. Specifically, it explores how they learned about freedom south of the border, the types of supplies they gathered for their escape attempts, and the ways in which Texas’s vast landscape shaped their experiences. It argues that the routes that led fugitive slaves to freedom in Mexico were a part of a precarious southern Underground Railroad, but one that operated in the absence of formal networks or a well-organized abolitionist movement. The chapter centers on fugitive slaves’ efforts toward self-emancipation and navigate contested spaces of slavery and freedom with little assistance and under difficult conditions. It sheds new light on the history of runaway slaves by examining the ways in which American westward expansion and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands shaped the fugitive slave experience in the nineteenth century.

Seeking Freedom in the Midst of Slavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-136
Author(s):  
Damian Alan Pargas
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The U.S

Slave flight in the antebellum South did not always coincide with the political geography of freedom. Indeed, spaces and places within the U.S. South attracted the largest number of fugitive slaves. From the forests that bordered plantation districts (where slaves remained hidden and maintained by local slave communities) to southern cities (where slaves attempted to pass for free blacks), a majority of fugitive slaves strove for freedom by disguising themselves within the slaveholding states rather than risk long-distance flight attempts to formally free territories such as the northern U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This chapter examines the experiences of fugitive slaves who fled to southern cities between 1800 and 1860. It touches upon themes such as the motivations for fleeing to urban areas (e.g., slave families dodging forced migration), the networks that facilitated such flight attempts, and the ways in which runaway slaves navigated sites of “informal freedom” after arrival in urban areas. Whereas some scholars have approached this group of runaways mainly as “absentees” or “truants” (temporary runaways), this chapter argues that throughout the South, many fugitive slaves who hid out in towns and cities were in fact permanent refugees from slavery—at least by intent, and often by outcome.

scholarly journals “Urban Refugees: Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Informal Freedom in the American South”

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-284
Author(s):  
Damian Alan Pargas
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
American South ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Urban Refugees ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
The American South

Slave flight in the antebellum South did not always coincide with the political geography of freedom. Indeed, spaces and places within the South attracted the largest number of fugitive slaves, especially southern cities, where runaway slaves attempted to pass for free blacks. Disguising themselves within the slaveholding states rather than risk long-distance flight attempts to formally free territories such as the northern us, Canada, and Mexico, fugitive slaves in southern cities attempted to escape slavery by crafting clandestine lives for themselves in what I am calling “informal” freedom—a freedom that did not exist on paper and had no legal underpinnings, but that existed in practice, in the shadows. This article briefly examines the experiences of fugitive slaves who fled to southern cities in the antebellum period (roughly 1800–1860). It touches upon themes such as the motivations for fleeing to urban areas, the networks that facilitated such flight attempts, and, most importantly, the lot of runaway slaves after arrival in urban areas.

The Underground Railroad

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arna Bontemps
Keyword(s):  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Grape Vine ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Runaway Slaves

This chapter discusses the role of the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses, in providing a means for slaves in Illinois and other parts of the country to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. Citizens of Bond County, Illinois, had been harboring runaway slaves as early as 1819. The first known case of dispatching a fugitive from Chicago to Canada occurred in 1839. Much of the communication relating to fugitive slaves was carried on in a guarded language. Special signals, whispered conversations, passwords, and figuratively phrased messages were the usual methods of conveying information about underground passengers, or about parties in pursuit of fugitives. The abolitionists knew these as the “grape-vine telegraph.” This chapter considers a variety of ways in which fugitives were conveyed from station to station, along with the participation of railroads in this endeavor.

Underground Railroad

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loren Schweninger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Final Destination ◽  
The North ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Severe Punishment ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In

The Underground Railroad refers to efforts of “conductors” and “station masters” assisting slave “passengers” to escape from bondage. The term itself was not used until the late 1830s, although Runaways had plagued the South’s peculiar institution from its beginning. In theory, the escaping slaves were helped from one point to another point until they reached their final destination in the North or Canada. By the 1840s the term was used often. In 1842, an Albany, New York abolitionist newspaper reported that twenty-six fugitives had passed through the city, and that “all went by the underground railroad.” During the 1850s, the term came into general use as newspapers in the North, including the New York Times, described the Underground Railroad as “organized arrangements made in various sections of the county, to aid fugitives from slavery.” Some of the accounts tell of secret passageways, sliding wall panels, hidden rooms in “safe houses,” and dramatic escapes, as men, women, and children made their way to freedom. Although estimates vary, during the thirty years prior to the Civil War probably fewer than one or two thousand slaves escaped from the South to the North each year, through their own efforts or with the assistance of sympathetic whites and/or free blacks. If they were fortunate enough to cross the Mason-Dixon Line they were helped by free blacks and antislavery or abolitionist whites. It is clear that the Underground Railroad was neither a highly organized system with visibly defined routes and stations to assist escaping slaves, nor a system that remained in place over many years. Instead, it was a loose collection of local efforts, mostly in the North, to help fugitive blacks who began the journey from slavery to freedom. Vigilance committees thrived and then disintegrated only to be reconstituted in succeeding years. Tens of thousands of slaves each year ran away for various reasons but only a relative few were successful in securing freedom, and even then, many did so by their own individual efforts. Assistance offered to them was often brief and sporadic and the whites and blacks who did provide support many times feared possible discovery and realized they were indeed lawbreakers and subject to severe punishment.

Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
The U.S

Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America examines and contrasts the experiences of various groups of African-American slaves who tried to escape bondage between the revolutionary era and the U.S. Civil War. Whereas much of the existing scholarship tends to focus on fugitive slaves in very localized settings (especially in communities and regions north of the Mason-Dixon line), the eleven contributions in this volume bring together the latest scholarship on runaway slaves in a diverse range of geographic settings throughout North America—from Canada to Virginia and from Mexico to the British Bahamas—providing a broader and more continental perspective on slave refugee migration. The volume innovatively distinguishes between various “spaces of freedom” to which runaway slaves fled, specifically sites of formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished and refugees were legally free, even if the meanings of freedom in these places were heavily contested); semi-formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished but asylum for runaway slaves was either denied or contested, such as the northern U.S., where state abolition laws were curtailed by federal fugitive slave laws); and informal freedom (places within the slaveholding South where runaways formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations and pass for free). This edited volume encourages scholars to reroute and reconceptualize the geography of slavery and freedom in antebellum North America.

Modernizing America

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Labor Demand ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
New Exodus ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The North ◽  
The Difference

As late as 1911, a leading American geographer could confidently assert that blacks in the United States would always live chiefly in "the warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic states," "where they find the heat and moisture in which they thrive"; nature decreed that few would ever settle and fewer survive in the North because they could not withstand the cold. Events, though, were contradicting this blend of racial and climatic determinism. Black migration from the South to the colder states was already substantial. It intensified dramatically during World War I. A boom in labor demand in industry, along with a near-cessation of the immigration from Europe that had once filled it, drew black and white southerners alike in unheard-of numbers to the manufacturing cities of the North. The black exodus to Kansas in 1879 and 1880 had briefly looked as if it would become just such a mass interregional movement of population. But the pioneer Exodusters had suffered from the drastic change in climate, most of all because it affected their livelihoods in farming. Their skills, which lay in cotton growing, were useless in Kansas, and their experience did little to encourage others to follow. The great northward migration of the early twentieth century was a migration not to new farmlands but to the cities for factory and service employment. The difference in climate between southern origin and northern destination did not matter much to it. White southern farmers, fearing the loss of cheap labor, warned departing blacks that they would find the winters of the North too bitter to endure. The new exodus proceeded all the same, and it discredited in the process the long-held idea that either race or habit always imposed a latitudinal pattern on human movement. The change in climate from South to North did mean discomfort or worse for many who undertook it. They suffered especially from the unaccustomed cold that few could afford stoves and fuel to ward off—though they had suffered too from inadequate shelter and clothing in the southern winter.

South Carolina Takes the Lead

2020 ◽  
pp. 136-164
Author(s):  
William L. Barney
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
The Other ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The North ◽  
Upper South ◽  
White Workers ◽  
Planter Class

South Carolina had been in the forefront of Southern radicalism since the 1820s, and it took the lead once Lincoln was elected. Pushing to the side the fire-eater Robert B. Rhett and his followers as extremists who would precipitate a war and isolate South Carolina from the other Southern states, moderate lowcountry planters orchestrated a propaganda campaign to achieve peaceful, orderly secession that would pull in the other slave states. Aware that any unified Southern response would be stymied by the temporizing of the Upper South, the secessionists relied on separate state secession to be achieved by popularly elected state conventions. Cooperation would follow among the seceded states. Invoking the horrors of forced emancipation and racial equality under Republican rule with appeals to restore the past glory of South Carolina during the American Revolution, secessionist ideology produced a mandate for immediate secession. To clinch the support of Charleston’s white workers, a harsh repression of free blacks forced many to leave and flee to the North for safety. Sons of planters rushed to join the cause and women in the planter class reveled in their new political role of advocates for secession. Banners, flags, and songs celebrated deliverance from Northern tyranny as workers and clerks flooded the streets of Charleston. Speed was of the essence to ensure that passions did not cool, and once the secessionists pressured the legislature to push the date of the election for convention delegates up to December 6, the state’s secession was a foregone conclusion.

Gleanings of Freedom

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Grivno
Keyword(s):  
Rural Economy ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The People ◽  
Upper South

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. The Upper South during this period presents a unique perspective on how free and slave labor systems coexisted and interacted during a time when slavery and free labor were moving apart both geographically and ideologically. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line in the decades preceding the Civil War. The book closely examines a handful of counties in northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania to illustrate how these rural local communities represented issues of national historical significance, including the dynamic, multifaceted relationship between slave and free labor, the lives of free black and white farmhands, the domestic slave trade's impact on the people of the Upper South, and the struggles of enslaved and free blacks to liberate themselves and their families from bondage through immediate and delayed manumissions. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, the book reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.

Against Slave Power? Slavery and Runaway Slaves in Mexico-United States Relations, 1821–1857

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-170
Author(s):  
Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The Us ◽  
El Alto ◽  
Upper South ◽  
Lower South

This work analyses the diplomatic conflicts that slavery and the problem of runaway slaves provoked in relations between Mexico and the United States from 1821 to 1857. Slavery became a source of conflict after the colonization of Texas. Later, after the US-Mexico War, slaves ran away into Mexican territory, and therefore slaveholders and politicians in Texas wanted a treaty of extradition that included a stipulation for the return of fugitives. This article contests recent historiography that considers the South (as a region) and southern politicians as strongly influential in the design of foreign policy, putting into question the actual power not only of the South but also of the United States as a whole. The problem of slavery divided the United States and rendered the pursuit of a proslavery foreign policy increasingly difficult. In addition, the South never acted as a unified bloc; there were considerable differences between the upper South and the lower South. These differences are noticeable in the fact that southerners in Congress never sought with enough energy a treaty of extradition with Mexico. The article also argues that Mexico found the necessary leeway to defend its own interests, even with the stark differential of wealth and resources existing between the two countries. El presente trabajo analiza los conflictos diplomáticos entre México y Estados Unidos que fueron provocados por la esclavitud y el problema de los esclavos fugitivos entre 1821 y 1857. La esclavitud se convirtió en fuente de conflicto tras la colonización de Texas. Más tarde, después de la guerra Mexico-Estados Unidos, algunos esclavos se fugaron al territorio mexicano y por lo tanto dueños y políticos solicitaron un tratado de extradición que incluyera una estipulación para el retorno de los fugitivos. Este artículo disputa la idea de la historiografía reciente que considera al Sur (en cuanto región), así como a los políticos sureños, como grandes influencias en el diseño de la política exterior, y pone en tela de juicio el verdadero poder no sólo del Sur sino de Estados Unidos en su conjunto. El problema de la esclavitud dividió a Estados Unidos y dificultó cada vez más el impulso de una política exterior que favoreciera la esclavitud. Además, el Sur jamás operó como unidad: había diferencias marcadas entre el Alto Sur y el Bajo Sur. Estas diferencias se observan en el hecho de que los sureños en el Congreso jamás se esforzaron en buscar con suficiente energía un tratado de extradición con México. El artículo también sostiene que México halló el margen de maniobra necesario para defender sus propios intereses, pese a los fuertes contrastes de riqueza y recursos entre los dos países.

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