fugitive slave laws

In US history, laws concerning the treatment of slaves who had escaped from their owners. They were in force 1787-1864. The most controversial of these, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (part of the Compromise of 1850), was designed to make it easier for southern slave owners to retrieve slaves who had escaped to the North. The act was repealed in 1864, and slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

In 1787 the slave-holding states of the USA inserted provisions in their constitutions regulating the surrender of fugitive slaves, and in 1793 a federal fugitive slave law was enacted, allowing judges, without a jury or trial, to decide on the status of runaway slaves. However, the legislation was difficult to enforce; many northern states opposed it and enacted their own laws to protect the personal liberties of the fugitives and prohibit their officials from helping to recapture slaves. Northern sympathizers also helped fugitives escape the South to New England and Canada, a major route being the Underground Railroad. In 1850, responding to the demand of southern slave owners to protect their ‘property’, the US government passed the Fugitive Slave Act. This strengthened the 1793 act by holding officials responsible for the return of fugitive slaves, and making it illegal to help them escape. It also created the new position of ‘commissioner’, increasing the number of officials legally able to retrieve the fugitives.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was little more effective than the 1793 law that it replaced, and in fact served to increase sympathy for the abolitionist movement. Abolitionist leaders, enraged by the Act, sought ways around it both legally and illegally. Harriet Beecher Stowe refers to it directly in her antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52).