Examples of Fugitive Slave Law in the following topics:
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- Under the system of slavery in the United States, freedom for slaves was only possible by running away (which was difficult and illegal to do) or by manumission by the slave owners, which was frequently regulated or prohibited by law.
- In 1850, Congress (disproportionally represented by Southerners) passed a more stringent fugitive slave federal law.
- Penalties were imposed upon marshals who refused to enforce the law or from whom a fugitive should escape, and upon individuals who aided black people to escape .
- Massachusetts had abolished slavery in 1783, but the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 required government officials to assist slavecatchers in capturing fugitives within the state.
- A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves by Eastman Johnson
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- The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
required the return of runaway slaves by requiring authorities in free states
to return fugitive slaves to their masters.
- Some jurisdictions passed “personal
liberty laws," which mandated a jury trial before alleged fugitive slaves could
be moved.
- Pennsylvania (1842) that states did not have to
offer aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves, which greatly weakened the law
of 1793.
- In response to the weakening of the original fugitive slave law, the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made any federal marshal or other official who did
not arrest an alleged runaway slave liable to a fine of $1,000.
- The
Fugitive Slave Act was met with violent protest in the North.
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- With heavy political lobbying, the Compromise of
1850, passed by Congress after the Mexican-American War, stipulated a more
stringent Fugitive Slave Law.
- Federal marshals and professional bounty
hunters known as "slave catchers" pursued fugitives as far as the Canadian
border.
- The
risk was not limited solely to actual fugitives.
- Under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850, when suspected fugitives were seized and brought to a special magistrate
known as a "commissioner," they had no right to a jury trial and could not
testify on their own behalf.
- Upon arriving at their
destinations, many fugitives were disappointed.
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- By 1805, most Northern states had passed laws calling for either immediate or gradual abolition.
- Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780 law went
into effect remained enslaved for life.
- Their gradual abolition laws freed future
children of slaves at their birth, and all slaves after a certain date or
period of years.
- New Jersey's gradual abolition law
freed future children of slaves at birth, but those enslaved before the passage
of the gradual abolition law remained enslaved for life.
- Though illegal under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,
participants such as Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell,
Amos Noë Freeman, and others put themselves at risk to help slaves escape to freedom.
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- Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Stowe emphasized the horrors of slavery.
- An early law abolishing slavery in Rhode Island in 1652 foundered within 50 years.
- Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780 law went into effect were not freed until 1847.
- Rhode Island had limited slave trading in 1774.
- These northern emancipation acts typically provided that slaves born before the law was passed would be freed at a certain age, so remnants of slavery lingered.
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- The Compromise of 1850 left the question of slave versus free states to popular sovereignty.
- The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would be passed into law.
- The slave trade would be abolished in the District of Columbia.
- In the Compromise of 1850, popular sovereignty was not defined
as a guiding principle on the slave issue going forward.
- Furthermore, the
bill's strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Act angered many Northerners, and
even provoked violence in Northern cities.
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- Congress passed several laws between 1861 and 1863 that aided the growing movement toward emancipation.
- The first of these laws to be implemented was the First Confiscation Act of August 1861, which authorized the confiscation of any Confederate property, including slaves, by Union forces.
- In March 1862, Congress approved a Law Enacting an Additional Article of War, which forbade Union Army officers from returning fugitive slaves to their owners.
- The following month, Congress declared that the federal government would compensate slave owners who freed their slaves.
- In June 1862, Congress passed a Law Enacting Emancipation in the Federal Territories, and in July, passed the Second Confiscation Act, which contained provisions intended to liberate slaves held by rebels.
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- From the very beginning, it was a topic of debate in the drafting of the Constitution, with the slave trade protected for 20 years and slaves being counted toward Congressional apportionment.
- Slavery was also a subject of Federal legislation, as seen in the banning on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808 and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
- Between 1777 and 1804, anti-slavery laws or constitutions were passed in every state north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line.
- As a result of the very gradual approach taken by many states, New York did not free its last slaves until 1829, Rhode Island had 5 slaves still listed in the 1840 census, Pennsylvania's last slaves were freed in 1847, Connecticut did not completely abolish slavery until 1848, and slavery was not completely lifted in New Hampshire and New Jersey until the nationwide emancipation in 1865.
- They feared that the sudden emancipation of four million slaves would be problematic for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid.
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- Southern rape laws embodied race-based
double standards.
- Their bodies technically belonged to their owners by law.
- Beginning
in 1662, Southern colonies adopted into law the principle of partus sequitur
ventrem, by which children of slave women took the status of their mother
regardless of the father's identity.
- This was a departure from English common
law, which held that children took their father's status.
- The law relieved men of the
responsibility of supporting their children and confined the "secret"
of miscegenation to the slave quarters.
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- Influenced by restrictive laws and brutal treatment, slaves combined African and Christian customs to form a culture of survival and resistance.
- In many respects, American slave culture was a culture of survival and defiance against the American slave system.
- In the absence of a successful slave revolution, as in Haiti (although there were some abortive attempts by black slaves to violently claim their freedom), American slaves practiced other forms of resistance.
- Such laws commonly forbade slaves to learn to read or write or to associate with free Africans, and free blacks were forbidden from voting or holding public office.
- Literate slaves taught illiterates how to read and write, despite state laws that forbid slaves from literacy.