The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act

While researching Maelstrom, a follow-on novel to Tempest at Dawn, I dug into the details of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Democrats pushed the bill through with a slim margin, and it was signed into law by Millard Fillmore.

Reaction in free states was swift and bitter. Protests erupted overnight in almost every northern population center, with many openly proclaiming that they would not obey an unconstitutional law. Slaveholders dismissed the protests as “mongrel gatherings.”

By itself, the Fugitive Slave Act did not cause the Civil War, but it tilted the slave issue in favor of the slaveholding states, enraged the North, and encouraged the South's overbearing behavior.

Here’s what the law required.

The federal government took away state authority to find, return, and try escaped slaves.
The bill established a body of commissioners to hear cases with no right of appeal to the legal system.
Commissioners were paid $5 when they found for the accused and $10 when they ordered the accused runaway returned to slavery.
U.S. Marshals could conscript citizens against their will to run down fugitive slaves.
Accused fugitive slaves were denied due process and habeas corpus, which overrode many state laws.
Those assisting a fleeing slave faced stiff penalties.
No statute of limitations.

Slaveholders and their Northern Democratic supporters admitted that the law was probably unconstitutional, but they had the Supreme Court in their pocket with Chief Justice Taney and a majority of the justices from slaveholding states. Seven years later, Taney would rule in Dred Scott v. John Sanford that African Americans were not and could not be citizens.

The repercussions of shoving the Compromise of 1850 down the throat of the nation? Abolitionists saw that some Whigs were in cahoots with Democrats and formed the Republican Party. A man with a lucrative law practice decided to return to politics. Ten years after the Act, the Republican Party nominated that man as its candidate for president, and Abraham Lincoln became the sixteenth president of the United States. At his Cooper Union Address, Lincoln accused Democrats of promising “to destroy the government, unless you are allowed to construe and enforce the constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin.”

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