No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Personal Liberty Laws and Sectional Crisis: 1850-1861 Norman L. Rosenberg Although American Negro slavery came to be a uniquely southern institution, runaway slaves found no legal dividing line between slave and free states. The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, which guaranteed the return of interstate fugitives "held to Service or Labour ," gave southern slave codes extraterritorial validity, so that escape into a free state offered slaves no legal refuge from pursuit by their masters. During the 1850's rendition of slaves in northern states increasingly involved questions of states' rights and civil liberties. The use of federal officials to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 appeared to support antislavery charges that an aggressive "slave power" conspiracy was invading, under the protection of the national government, the free soil of sovereign northern states as well as free western territories above the Missouri Compromise line. The summary procedures of a fugitive slave hearing seemed to violate traditional standards of Anglo-American justice and to substantiate claims that slaveholders were antirepublican power mongers.1 A number of free state legislatures adopted statutes , so-called "personal liberty laws," which purported to counteract the use of federal power on behalf of slave interests and to insure state protection of the liberty of free Negroes by guaranteeing fugitive slave suspects rights such as trial by jury and habeas corpus. Southern spokesmen and most Northern Democrats charged that the liberty laws violated sacred constitutional obligations and threatened the property of citizens of slaveholding states. Despite northern and southern concern over the issue of fugitive slaves during the 1850's, historians have not adequately examined the personal liberty laws passed in that decade. Neither the laws' antebellum critics nor later historians have even agreed upon which states enacted liberty bills.'- An examination of the controversy surrounding 1 Arthur E. Bestor Jr., "State Sovereignty and Slavery: A Reinterpretation of Proslavery Constitutional Doctrine, 1846-1860," Journal of the Illinois Historical Society, LIV (1961), 117-180; Larry Gara, "Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction," Civil War History, XV (1969), 5-18. '- The laws passed before 1850 have been given greater attention than those enacted after the Fugitive Slave Act oí 1850. See Alexander Johnston, "Personal Liberty Laws," John J. Lalor (ed.), Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy , and of tiie Political History of the United States (Chicago, 1884), III, 162163 ; Julius Yanuck, "The Fugitive Slave Law and the Constitution" (Ph.D. Dissertation , Columbia University, 1953), 32-34; Joseph Nogee, "The Prigg Case and 25 26CIVIL WAR HISTORY these laws adds another dimension to the extent of mutual hostility and suspicion that existed between the slave and free sections of the Republic in November, 1860. Sectional conflict over the return of fugitive slaves originated in the ambiguity of the Constitution. Drafted hurriedly late in the Convention , the fugitive slave clause did not specify whether the return of runaway slaves was the responsibility of state or federal officials.3 The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 only complicated the problem of enforcement because its framers created no national apparatus to recover fugitive slaves. Slaveowners themselves were to seize their interstate runaways and to take them before a wide variety of state and national officers who, after a summary hearing, would issue a certificate authorizing their removal from the state.4 Antislavery groups complained that kidnappers took advantage of the Act's flimsy procedural safeguards to sell large numbers of blacks into slavery, but calls for additional protection of free Negroes encountered southern demands for strengthening the fugitive law by requiring greater state assistance to slave claimants.5 As a result, Congress passed no new legislation affecting fugitive slaves until 1850. Even though Congress did not act, some northern states adopted various kinds of laws. Kidnapping laws, the earliest and most limited type of state legislation, established penalties for abduction of free blacks but did not affect legitimate claims by slaveholders.6 A few northern legislatures passed a second type of statute which provided claimants with separate state procedures for rendition of runaways. Alternatives to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, these state fugitive slave laws did not seriously hamper the operation of the federal act and generally represented a...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.