Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
When Congress created "An Act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters", or more commonly known as the Fugitive Slave Act, they were responding to slave owners' need to protect their property rights, as written into the 1787 Constitution. Article IV of the Constitution required the federal government to go after runaway slaves. The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was the mechanism by which the government did that, and it was only at this point the government could pursue runaway slaves in any state or territory, and ensure slave owners of their property rights.
Section 3 is the part that deals with fugitive or runaway slaves, and reads in part:
SEC. 3. ...That when a person held to labor in any of the United States, or in either of the Territories on the Northwest or South of the river Ohio...shall escape into any other part of the said States or Territory, the person to whom such labor or service may be due...is hereby empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor...and upon proof...before any Judge...it shall be the duty of such Judge... the said fugitive from labor to the State or Territory from which he or she fled.
Section 4 makes assisting runaways and fugitives a crime and outlines the punishment for those who assisted runaway slaves:
SEC. 4. ...That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct or hinder such claimant ...shall...forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars.
In the early 19th century, Personal Liberty Laws were passed to hamper officials in the execution of the law, but this was mostly after the abolition of the Slave Trade, as there had been very little support for abolition prior; Indiana in 1824 and Connecticut in 1828 provided jury trial for fugitives who appealed from an original decision against them. In 1840, New York and Vermont extended the right of trial by jury to fugitives and provided them with attorneys. As early as the first decade of the 19th century, individual dissatisfaction with the law of 1793 had taken the form of systematic assistance rendered to African Americans escaping from the South to Canada or New England: the so-called Underground Railroad.
The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842 (16 Peters 539)—that state authorities could not be forced to act in fugitive slave cases, but that national authorities must carry out the national law—was followed by legislation in Massachusetts (1843), Vermont (1843), Pennsylvania (1847) and Rhode Island (1848), forbidding state officials from aiding in enforcing the law and refusing the use of state jails for fugitive slaves.
Read more about this topic: Fugitive Slave Laws
Famous quotes containing the words fugitive slave, fugitive, slave and/or act:
“Is this what all these soldiers, all this training, have been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perfect Scepticisme ... is a disease incurable, and a thing rather to be pitied or laughed at, then seriously opposed. For when a man is so fugitive and unsettled that he will not stand to the verdict of his own Faculties, one can no more fasten any thing upon him, than he can write in the water, or tye knots in the wind.”
—Henry More (1614–1687)
“Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.”
—Anaïs Nin (1903–1977)