A closer look
Resistance to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act
How does the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 reveal what citizens can do when they consider a federal law immoral or unjust?
by Pennee Bender, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Strengthening the Power of Enslavers
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 forced citizens across the country who were morally opposed to slavery to decide whether to follow their conscience or to follow federal law. For free northern Black communities, the law jeopardized their lives and livelihood. The law required all citizens to report knowledge of alleged runaways and assist in their capture, or to risk being fined or imprisoned. Those who chose to obey the law had to confront their complicity in the institution and brutality of slavery. Many northern states had become sanctuary zones for Freedom seekers by enacting personal liberty laws that ameliorated the impact of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law. These laws guaranteed runaways the right to a jury trial and limited the role of local law enforcement in returning runaways to the South, thus significantly reducing slave owners’ ability to reenslave escapees. The new law, though, overrode these state laws and greatly strengthened the legal hand of slave owners and slave catchers. It denied formerly enslaved escapees the right to challenge the legality of their seizure in court, to testify on their own behalf, and to be judged by a jury; and it allowed federal commissioners to cross state lines to pursue runaways. Northern abolitionists, such as Reverend Charles Beecher, encouraged citizens to openly defy the law, as illustrated in this excerpt from one of his 1851 sermons.
The 1850 law jeopardized the lives and liberty of free Black people, even those who had never been enslaved, as slave catchers became emboldened to kidnap and sell whoever they could. In some cases, slave catchers sent descriptions of African Americans living freely in the North to enslavers in the South to generate false claims and receive authorization to capture free Black people. An enslaver’s accusation that someone was a runaway was enough to result in an arrest. The growing numbers of slave catchers, and the sight of African Americans being snatched and placed in chains in cities and towns across the country, brought the brutality of slavery into the lives of all Americans and became a turning point for the abolitionist movement. Images such as this 1850 lithograph, entitled “The Effects of the Fugitive Slave Law,” portrayed the violence inflicted by slave catchers and highlighted the biblical and constitutional basis for opposing the law.
Strengthening Opposition to Slavery
Members of the abolition movement, including free African Americans, viewed the law as an impetus to increase and strengthen the opposition to slavery. In the years immediately following the Fugitive Slave Act, there were numerous cases of mass protest, covert assistance in aiding fugitives to safety, public fundraising to purchase a person out of slavery, and in some cases armed resistance against the government-sanctioned slave catchers. In September1851 in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a small town in Lancaster County, the African American community organized to resist slave catchers and rose up to defend runaways who were threatened, as described by William Parker and a newspaper account included here. The citizens of Lancaster County, many of them Quakers, refused to prosecute those accused of killing the slave owner. As one historian commented, public responses to the Fugitive Slave Law could be considered the first Black Lives Matter movement, as Black people in the North protested the outrage of slavery and stormed the jails where runaways were held. It could also be considered a precursor to the current sanctuary-city movement to protect immigrants, as citizens formed Vigilance Committees in cities across the North in the 1850s to assist escaped enslaved people, by offering protection and sanctuary to those staying in the United States or aiding those who chose to escape to Canada.
Reflection Questions
What do you think is the significance of the two quotes in the print, “Effects of the Fugitive-Slave-Law?”
How do the forms of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act described in these documents differ from one another and why may that be the case?
Given the responses to the Fugitive Slave Act that are represented in these documents, how would you describe its impact in the North?
Additional Reading
Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Penguin Books, 2019).
Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Jonathan Katz, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana Pennsylvania, September 11, 1851: A Documentary Account (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974).
Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015)
Related Chapters
The Settlement of the West and the Conflict over Enslaved Labor, 1848-1860Related Items
Effects of the Fugitive-Slave-LawThe Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws
The Freedman’s Story
“The Christiana Tragedy”