Fugitive Slave Clause

5 Key excerpts on "Fugitive Slave Clause"

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  Slavery and the Founders

  Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson

  • Paul Finkelman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  During the first decade under the Constitution, Congress dealt with issues of the slave trade, the problem of slavery in the territories, and the admission of new slave states. Most important, in 1793 Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave Law, which aided southerners hunting after their runaway human chattel. This law was a major boon to the South with no reciprocal gain for the North. In addition to the substance of the law, the adoption of the law was an important constitutional change.

  The Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution provided: “No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”2 Arguably, this clause did not give Congress the power to pass any statute to enforce the provision, but merely admonished the states to act in a certain way. By interpreting the clause in the way it did, Congress made the Constitution even more proslavery than it perhaps was.

  Late in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 Pierce Butler and Charles Pinckney, both of South Carolina, proposed that a Fugitive Slave Clause be added to the provision requiring the interstate extradition of fugitives from justice. James Wilson of Pennsylvania objected to the juxtaposition because “this would oblige the Executive of the State to do it, at the public expence.” Butler discreetly “withdrew his proposition in order that some particular provision might be made apart from this article.” A day later, the Convention, without debate or formal vote, adopted the fugitive slave provision.3 Eventually the two clauses emerged as succeeding paragraphs in Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution.

  The paucity of debate over the Fugitive Slave Clause is remarkable because by the end of August 1787, when the Convention adopted the clause, slavery had emerged as one of the major stumbling blocks to a stronger union. While it was morally offensive to a number of northern delegates, some southerners defended slavery with an analysis that anticipated the “positive good” argu-ments of the antebellum period. Nevertheless, unlike the debates over the slave trade, the three-fifths clause, the taxation of exports, and the regulation of commerce, the proposal for a Fugitive Slave Clause generated no serious opposition. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention may have been simply too exhausted for further strenuous debate. It is more likely, however, that the northern delegates failed to appreciate the legal problems and moral dilemmas that the rendition of fugitive slaves would pose. In 1787 even those northern states that were in the process of gradual abolition, such as Pennsylvania, recognized the need to return runaway slaves to their owners.4

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  At the Precipice

  Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis

  • Shearer Davis Bowman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution states that persons “held to Service or Labour” in one state who escape into another state are not to be “discharged from Service.” Instead, stipulated the Founding Fathers, such persons are to be “delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour shall be due.” The euphemistic phrase “held to Service or Labour” reflected not just the Founding Fathers’ reluctance to use the word “slavery” or “bondage” in a document whose preamble proclaimed its intention to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The phrasing also reflected the fact that indentured servitude and formal apprenticeship for whites remained legal in many states. Later, when New York and other northern states began the process of gradual emancipation, slaves born after a certain date would still be required to serve a lengthy term as indentured servants before attaining personal freedom. Moreover, in the words of two constitutional scholars, “the precise meaning” of the Fugitive Slave Clause “was vague in that it did not make clear what agency, state or federal, was charged with its execution.” Since Article IV dealt with various issues related to “interstate comity”—that is, the principle by which the court system of one state might accede to or give effect to the laws of another state—it could be and was at first deemed, particularly in Congress’s Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, that responsibility for the return of runaway slaves lay with the individual states rather than with federal authorities. 27 In 1842, the Supreme Court attempted to clarify the meaning and intent of Article IV, Section 2, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania. Justice Joseph Story composed the official opinion and thereby helped set the legal stage for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. According to legal historian Don E

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  Contesting Slavery

  The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation

  • John Craig Hammond, Matthew Mason(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  43

  The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 contained a Fugitive Slave Clause, which provided in substance that fugitive slaves must be delivered up to the person entitled to their labor. The ordinance could not have included its bar on slavery within the territory and still have been adopted with slave state support unless it included such a clause. The political indispensability of such a slave recapture provision was so widely accepted that it had been included voluntarily in draft ordinance legislation since 1785 by Massachusetts congressman Rufus King, its lead sponsor.44

  Concerns about protecting slave property against flight led slave state representatives to seek to add the Fugitive Slave Clause to the Constitution. Historians differ about why the Constitutional Convention unanimously agreed to their proposal.45 A particularly interesting historical question is why the clause—and the legislation Congress adopted to implement it in 1793—provided very little protection for the rights of fugitive slaves.

  At the Philadelphia convention, states that had already begun gradual abolition could have insisted that fugitive slaves who fled to free jurisdictions should be treated as free men until it was proven that they were legally slaves. Since most American states had explicitly adopted English common law, under the principles of Somerset they could have asserted, for example, that the rights of such fugitive slaves in free states should include the right not to be physically seized by a slave owner. Free states could also have insisted that an alleged fugitive slave should have a statutory right to testify, or be entitled to a jury trial. Lord Mansfield had permitted an alleged slave to testify in a jury trial of an English slave freedom case decided just before Somerset.46

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  Liberty and Union

  A Constitutional History of the United States, concise edition

  • Edgar J. McManus, Tara Helfman(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Because McLean had politicized the case by referring to slavery as an evil, the other justices felt compelled to speak out on the issue. To say nothing might be taken for tacit agreement. Although Taney agreed with McLean that the states could exclude slaves, he carefully avoided giving offense to the South. “The power over this subject,” he said, “is exclusively with the several states; and each of them has the right to decide for itself whether it will or will not allow persons of this description to be brought within its borders from another State, either for sale or for any other purpose.” Justice Baldwin sharply disagreed. He contended that slaves were property and that Congress had a duty under the Fifth Amendment to protect all property “from any state law which affects to prohibit its transmission for sale from one State to another.” It therefore logically followed that the amendment also prevented Congress from interfering in the interstate shipment of slaves. Justices Story and McKinley further complicated matters with dissenting opinions that the Mississippi prohibition was not only constitutional but barred the creditors from enforcing the notes.

  Fugitive Slaves and Due Process of Law

  No aspect of the slavery issue was more controversial than the capture and return of runaway slaves. Article IV of the Constitution provided that persons who fled from bondage across state lines “shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” In 1793 Congress gave effect to this provision by passing a fugitive slave law establishing federal procedures for the return of runaways. The law caused no controversy at the time because slavery had not yet emerged as a serious sectional issue. But by the 1820s both slavery and the law came under attack in the North. Northerners complained that the federal procedures for the return of runaways did not adequately protect free blacks in the North against unjust enslavement. The process was stacked outrageously against alleged runaways in fugitive slave proceedings. Federal judges had authority to issue certificates of return on the oath of the owner or his agent that the person claimed was a fugitive. The mere word of the claimant was enough to consign any African American to bondage.

  The shortcomings of the federal process led northern states to pass so-called personal liberty laws. These laws made it a crime for claimants to remove alleged runaways without first obtaining an order of removal from a state court. The state court proceedings for obtaining the order were as heavily stacked against slaveholders as the federal proceedings were stacked in their favor. Some state judges refused to issue orders of removal regardless of the evidence. New York gave alleged runaways the right to a jury trial, and juries almost always brought in verdicts against the claimant. Despite their rights under federal law, slaveholders found it virtually impossible to recover their runaways through state court proceedings. But failure to comply with the state procedures could result in heavy fines and prison terms.

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  The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom

  A Comprehensive History

  • Wilbur H. Siebert(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  In August of the following year the national convention of the new party, comprising nearly a thousand delegates from all the free states except New Hampshire, made the disavowal of the fugitive recovery clause of the Constitution a part of the party platform, voting by a decisive majority “to regard and treat the third clause of the Constitution, whenever applied to the case of a fugitive slave, as utterly null and void; and consequently as forming no part of the Constitution of the United States whenever we are called upon or sworn to support it.” 906 About the time of the announcement of this principle, Mr. Garrison issued in behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society an address to the bondmen of the South, in which they were promised deliverance from their chains, and were encouraged to run away from their masters. “If you come to us, and are hungry,” ran the address, “we will feed you; if thirsty, we will give you drink; if naked, we will clothe you; if sick, we will minister to your necessities; if in prison, we will visit you; if you need a hiding-place from the face of the pursuer, we will provide one that even bloodhounds will not scent out.” 907 Such open attacks upon the property rights of planters and slave-traders must have been extremely aggravating to Southerners, and, of course, contributed to bring the question of a more effective Fugitive Slave Law again under the consideration of Congress, notwithstanding the fact that a large share of that body’s attention was occupied during the period from 1844 to 1848 with matters connected with the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War and the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute. In 1847 the legislature of Kentucky presented a petition to Congress urging the importance of new laws so framed as to enable the citizens of slaveholding states to reclaim their negroes when they had absconded into the free states. This resulted in a bill reported in the Senate, but the bill never got beyond its second reading

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