The Fugitives

(noun)

The Fugitives were a group of poets and literary scholars who came together at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, around 1920.

Related Terms

Examples of The Fugitives in the following topics:

  • The Fugitive Slave Act

    • 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.
    • Others forbade the use of local jails or the assistance of state officials in the arrest or return of alleged fugitive slaves.
    • 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.
    • Explain the economic and political context of the Fugitive Slave Act and how Northerners responded to it

  • Slavery and Liberty

    • The emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the population of northern free blacks, from several hundreds in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.
    • 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

  • The Election of 1852

    • The presidential election of 1852 was the last time the Whig Party nominated a candidate; the party collapsed shortly thereafter.
    • The election of 1852 was the last election in which the Whig Party nominated a candidate before the party collapsed following Winfield Scott’s loss to Franklin Pierce.
    • The outcome was a testament to the sectional and organizational weaknesses within the Whig Party.
    • During his years in office, Pierce’s support of the Compromise of 1850—particularly his rigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act—appalled and alienated many Northerners, including factions of the Democratic Party.
    • With the demise of the Whig Party, many Northerners, bitterly resenting the heavy enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act under Pierce, began to loosely coalesce with the emerging antislavery Republican Party.

  • The Underground Railroad

    • The term is also applied to the abolitionists—black and white, free and enslaved—who aided the fugitives.
    • 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.

  • The Southern Renaissance

    • The Southern Renaissance literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s broke from the romantic view of the Confederacy.
    • In the 1920s, the satirist H.L.
    • The start of the Southern Renaissance is often traced back to the activities of "The Fugitives," a group of poets and critics based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, just after the First World War.
    • Together they created the magazine, The Fugitive (1922–1925), so named because the editors announced they fled "from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South."
    • Chestnutt, who penned the novels, The House Behind the Cedars in 1900 and The Marrow of Tradition the following year.

  • The Compromise of 1850

    • However, the admission of California as a free state would tip the balance of power in the Senate.
    • The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would be passed into law.
    • Furthermore, the bill's strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Act angered many Northerners, and even provoked violence in Northern cities.
    • During the debate over the Compromise, John C.
    • Evaluate the impact of the Compromise of 1850 on the slavery debate

  • Emerson and Thoreau

    • His work includes such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience.
    • Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
    • Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas and themes .such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world.
    • When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."
    • He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown.

  • Conclusion: The Increasing Inevitability of War

    • The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850, caused controversy and contributed to Northern fears of a "slave power conspiracy."
    • The presidential election of 1852 was the last time the Whig party nominated a candidate—the party collapsed shortly thereafter.
    • During his years in office, his support of the Compromise of 1850—particularly his rigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act—appalled and alienated many Northerners.
    • The Lecompton Constitution guaranteed the protection of slavery in the region and received the support of President Buchanan and the Southern Democrats.
    • The raid deepened the growing psychological rift between the two regions.

  • Buchanan's Waiting Game

    • After the 1860 election, President Buchanan did little to prevent secession or prepare the United States for the possibility of war.
    • As part of their justification for leaving the union, secessionists argued that the Constitution was a compact among states that could be abandoned at any time without consultation and that each state reserved the right to secede from the compact.
    • In the aftermath of the Presidential election of 1860, President Buchanan did little to halt this secessionist tide in the Deep South.
    • He placed the blame for the crisis solely on the interference of Northern abolitionists in Southern affairs, and suggested that if the North did not "repeal their unconstitutional and obnoxious enactments... the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union. "
    • Buchanan's only suggestion to solve the crisis was "an explanatory amendment" that reaffirmed the constitutionality of slavery, strengthened fugitive slave laws, and prevented Congress from legislating against the expansion of slavery into the territories.

  • Skin Color in the South

    • The result was numerous mixed-race children.
    • In many households, for instance, the way in which slaves were treated depended on the slave's skin color.
    • Some planters freed both the children and the mothers of their children.
    • A woodcut from the abolitionist Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) depicts a slave patrol capturing a fugitive slave.
    • Explain how skin color and the relationship between slave and master shaped the slave community