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This chapter reexamines the legal and sometimes violent contest between antislavery and proslavery forces regarding enforcement of the federal fugitive slave code in the urban North. It argues that recent scholarship on this subject has made clearer that northern vigilance committees and abolitionists were remarkably successful in pursuing various legal and political strategies on the ground, even in cities with strong anti-black, proslavery sentiment and even after passage of the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Relying on personal liberty statutes, sympathetic juries, targeted mobbing, and a host of other tactics, the vigilance movement largely succeeded not only in frustrating slave catchers on northern territory but also in protecting their own operatives from violence and legal repercussions.

This chapter examines how black Bay Staters in the 1850s strove to claim “manhood” and “citizenship” by representing themselves and their ancestors as agents in history. This endeavor was especially pressing after 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act made African Americans vulnerable to slave catchers, even on the professedly free ground of the North. In this context, Crispus Attucks, who had largely been forgotten in early national commemorations of the Revolutionary War, assumed his place as black America's finest example of patriotism and heroism. The leading figure in the effort to recover the agency of Attucks and other black patriots was William Cooper Nell, an abolitionist, integrationist, and historian who published The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855. This chapter interprets the revival of interest in black Revolutionary heroism in the context of the struggle for African American civil rights in Massachusetts, with particular attention to the effort to allow black men to serve in the militia.

This chapter describes the impact of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It argues that the legal and moral demands being made by the Slave Power severed the relationship between law, on the one hand, and order on the other. Before 1850 it was antiabolitionists who were prone to use violence in Northern cities to break up antislavery meetings; afterwards the militancy was on the side of those, as in the notorious Anthony Burns case in Boston, who opposed slave catchers, even though the latter had the law on their side. Even Northerners who disdained antislavery agitation were driven to see slavery as an active threat to order and stability.

This chapter highlights the role Free Soil Party politicians like Salmon Chase and John P. Hale played in heated debates over the Compromise of 1850 and then Free Soilers’ efforts to rouse opposition to new legislation. Targeting the Fugitive Slave Act especially, political abolitionists in the Free Soil Party worked to ensure continued attention to the Slave Power’s control over both major parties. Simultaneously, in several northern states, Free Soil managers experimented with coalition politics, often collaborating with Democrats at the state level but with mixed results. While these coalitions typically ended in disillusionment, Massachusetts Free Soilers succeeded in electing Charles Sumner to the United States Senate, where he would become perhaps the most noted antislavery firebrand in national politics. The immediate results of the presidential election of 1852 proved deeply disappointing, seemingly signalling national consensus on the recent sectional compromise, but Free Soilers remained confident that as old issues differentiating the major parties receded into the background, impending new slavery controversies would force the partisan reorganization political abolitionists had long sought.

This chapter discusses the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which legitimized and lent immediacy to an argument that abolitionists had long been making—that Northerners were complicit in the slave system. Northern outrage at the law, in turn, legitimized a long-standing argument of the South's proslavery vanguard—that Northerners could not be trusted to keep their promises. Such a dialectic reflected the design of the bill's Southern sponsors, who knew well that the bill's measures were “gratuitously provocative.” The new fugitive slave policy created a class of federal commissioners who would act as judge and jury when claims for rendition of slaves were brought before them by slaveholders, their agents, or federal marshals, who were required by law to assist slaveholders.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, explores how the original Constitution failed to stop the spread of slavery and the debasement of the enslaved. He then describes what he refers to as the nation’s “second founding”—the addition to the Constitution after the Civil War of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which promised the possibility of a new definition of American citizenship and individual rights. Foner’s essay is accompanied by primary source selections that focus on pre-Civil War controversies involving the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision; the constitutional justifications offered by the South for secession and by the North for the abolition of slavery; and the pivotal series of Supreme Court decisions at the close of the nineteenth century that dramatically narrowed the reach and purpose of the postwar amendments.

This chapter discusses the law on runaway slaves. The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the US Supreme Court’s decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) dominated the legal landscape in 1847. The act of 1793 implemented Section 2(3) of Article IV of the US Constitution by establishing a somewhat summary procedure for recovering runaways. The statute authorized a slave owner or owner’s agent to seize a purported fugitive, take him or her before a federal or state judicial officer, and offer written or oral sworn testimony that the accused was the claimant’s slave “under the laws of the State or Territory from which he or she fled.” If the judge agreed, he had no choice but to provide the claimant with a certificate of ownership of the individual in question. The case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) involved a slave catcher who failed to follow Pennsylvania’s 1826 personal liberty law and was prosecuted, bringing the constitutionality of that law into question.

This chapter situates the couple's downfall within the tightening racial ideologies exemplified in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Act codified the immobility of slaves and threatened free people of color with kidnapping. Like many others endangered by the new law, the Tubbees headed for Canada, but fear of racial persecution was only part of the reason they fled. Okah Tubbee's racial claims were publicly contested in this era, and his brief and apparently bigamous marriage to Sarah Marlett intensified the scrutiny. Meanwhile, accusations about medical malpractice threatened the Tubbees' new livelihood as Indian doctors in Toronto. The chapter considers the last edition of their autobiography as a counter to both a decline in the utility of their Indian guise and the spate of bad publicity.

This chapter examines how Northern Democrats, led by President Franklin Pierce, achieved legislative victory for the Slave Power. Pierce faced a host of formidable challenges as he tried to craft a domestic and diplomatic program that would please the Slave Power and distract Americans from divisions over slavery. While he owed his nomination and election to the South, Pierce would have to somehow bring about an expansion of slavery if he hoped for continuing support from that section. This chapter first considers Pierce's activist foreign policy before discussing the role of Attorney General Caleb Cushing in implementing Pierce's domestic policies, including the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. It then describes a bill in Congress aimed to permit the expansion of slavery into the then-free western territories, as well as the Northern Democrats' development of a policy called “popular sovereignty.” Finally, it provides an overview of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.

The debates over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 reveal key proslavery arguments, such as the importance of economic utility, a sense that slavery is nearly ubiquitous in human history, and that slavery cannot be ended without doing more harm than good. Such arguments, which mirror arguments made by proslavery southern academics, confirm that the academics and politicians were speaking a similar language. While the Fugitive Slave Act has often been studied in the North, as an episode where Northerners debated whether to follow an unjust law, in the South the Act served to reconfirm values about the morality of holding humans as property. When antislavery northerners argued against the Act, southern supporters used the debate to articulate the jurisprudence of slavery: that it was supported by economic considerations and that it was immoral to free enslaved people because that would result in more suffering than continuing slavery.

How is it that Frederick Douglass did not find it necessary to foreground his racial identity until late in life, as he suggests in the 1892 supplement to Life and Times? This chapter proposes two ways to account for Douglass’s suggestion: one, antebellum legal culture was not invested in regulating the identities of its citizens, and so the meaning of identifying terms, such as “black man,” may have been contested, but was also left largely unspecified. Two, Douglass seems to rely on a thinking close to Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Emmanuel Benveniste, which suggests that the living body always remains silent while, in another register, the speaking body enters the world of discourse. Agamben reads the split between bodies as conditional for testimony; Douglass, however, consistently sought a vocabulary that would express his once-enslaved body and allow it to be recognized as, simply, that of a citizen. Douglass’s testimony looks toward an identity between living body and speaking body, and toward a legal climate that would instantiate the language that was always just out of his reach.

This chapter describes events from 1849 onwards. These include the removal of the slave trade across the Potomac River to Alexandria, Virginia in 1850; Horace Mann's defense of Drayton and Sayres; Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts' introduction of a bill in 1861 providing for an end to slavery in the District of Columbia; and Congress's repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1864.

This chapter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Franklin Pierce, focusing on six realms: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Pierce won the Democratic Party's 1852 presidential nomination after a forty-eight ballot impasse in which none of the party's top three leaders was able to muster the two-thirds vote needed to become the Democratic flag bearer. A gregarious nonentity, he took office amid growing anger over the Fugitive Slave Act and passed on to his successor an acutely polarized nation. Pierce's historical reputation is captured in a survey of sixty-four historians conducted by C-SPAN in which he ranked fortieth in a field of forty-two.

This chapter examines how Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy traversed an uneven political ground in 1855 to move their respective positions on slavery into almost perfect alignment. It first provides an overview of Lincoln and Lovejoy's political grounding before discussing the political agreement that would allow Lincoln to advance his candidacy for the U.S. Senate and for Lovejoy to find a venue to correct some intentional mischaracterizations of the early Republican Party in Illinois. It also considers the two men's speeches in which they both regarded the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a big mistake; their contradictory perceptions of the abolitionists; and their disagreement over the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the cautious approach taken by Lovejoy and others in uniting various antislavery groups.

In 1797, the confrontation between the Quakers of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina came to debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as the result of two petitions. The first was the following memorial from four former North Carolina slaves who had been manumitted by their Quaker owners and had taken up residence in Philadelphia. Fearing re-enslavement and forcible return to North Carolina under the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, they sought the help of the Rev. Absalom Jones, one of the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who helped them draft the memorial, “the earliest black petition to Congress.”

Green generated income for himself while still a slave by recycling discarded items, even bacon grease from Dobyns's warehouse floor, which he sold to a soap manufacturer and with the proceeds bought a set of silver spoons. Dobyns's 8-year-old daughter taught Elisha, who already knew how to read, how to write. Both Dobyns and Maysville were growing in wealth, Dobyns investing in a projected railroad eastward from Maysville. Slaveholders near Maysville were increasingly alarmed by news of escaping slaves; Ripley, Ohio, eight miles west, was had some dedicated underground railroad operators, including John Rankin and John Parker. Free blacks were increasingly viewed with suspicion. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Green had difficulty traveling to Ohio on church business. Slave catchers were even venturing into Ohio to kidnap non-enslaved blacks.

Chapter 10 covers Washington’s complex relationship with slavery. First, the chapter looks at the slavery cases that he decided as a judge. Second, the discussion turns to his tenure as the president of the American Colonization Society, which advocated for gradual emancipation and the establishment of a free Black nation in Liberia. Third, the chapter looks at the justice’s controversial sale of enslaved people from Mount Vernon in 1821 and his defense of that sale, which provides a unique window into the thinking of a slaveowner and the anti-slavery criticism that he received in the press.

This chapter describes how British liberals, energized and agitated by the proceedings at the Congress of Vienna, took aim at ongoing oppression overseas, especially the international slave trade and continental despotism. The result was a major expansion of refugee relief. All-out interventionism was not feasible, and refuge provided an alternative to doing nothing. This philanthropic act became all the more entrenched in national moral politics in the wake of the American Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Each case provided an opportunity for British activists—from liberal and conservative elites, to devout missionaries and abolitionists, to radical Chartists—to assist the persecuted and, in so doing, to celebrate British liberties against the backdrop of foreign oppression.

The open national conflict over slavery drew the West into the vortex of events during the 1850s. In the final antebellum decade, political fault lines compromised the former regional consensus as increasing numbers of white residents aligned for and against slavery. The moderate regional variants of the national parties, including the new Republican Party born in the region, were challenged by sectionalized platforms. Despite the region’s slave states having comparatively few bondpeople, the democratic contours of slaveholding altered their political economy to defend the peculiar institution against “northern” agitators, namely abolitionists. Each successive controversy sent shock waves through the region and complicated the western consensus. But it did not yet fully sectionalize it, evidenced by voters’ response to the outcome of the 1860 presidential election that polarized the North and South politically and ideologically.

As the WNYASS dissolved, the Posts turned to less visible ways of advancing social justice. They became more involved with the Congregational Friends, now known as Progressive Friends, which promoted practical righteousness. A series of economic and medical crises also fostered more personal forms of action. The Posts assisted the increased flow of fugitives following the Fugitive Slave Act, but questioned Douglass’s and Nell’s support of armed resistance. Nell eventually persuaded Amy of its necessity. The Posts regularly housed abolitionists, spiritualists, and other activists; cared for friends and family who were ill or impoverished; aided abused wives; and joined protests against capital punishment. Amy accompanied Lucy Stone on two lecture tours, but she spent far more time corresponding with her extensive network of friends and family, keeping them apprized of political and personal developments. Harriet Jacobs, who was finishing Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, regularly sought Amy’s advice and support. After John Brown’s 1859 raid, the Posts helped Douglass escape to Canada, reigniting their friendship. By spring 1861, with the nation at war, Amy helped organize a gathering with Douglass and other speakers to help direct “this bloody struggle, that it may end in Emancipation.”