Legal and Constitutional Issue of Fugitive Slaves

The legal status of escaped slaves emerged as the chief concern of the antislavery bar, and it was in state and federal courtrooms that its members honed their legal arguments. Congress implemented the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Under the act, an owner or his or her agent could seize a suspected runaway and, after obtaining a certificate from a federal judge or local magistrate, haul the person back to the owner's state. The measure depended on the willingness of state and local authorities to cooperate, because the federal legal presence was limited. The measure was also subject to criticism, because it extended no due-process protections to individuals seized under it, making free blacks as well as fugitive slaves easy targets for ambitious slave catchers.

By the 1830s the antislavery bar began a sustained campaign against the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act. Salmon P. Chase and James G. Birney, a former Alabama slaveholder who was converted to the antislavery cause, fired the first salvo in 1837 in the case of an escaped slave, Matilda Lawrence. When Lawrence was dragged before a local magistrate, Chase condemned the 1793 act. The Cincinnati lawyer, who came to be known as the "attorney general for runaway negroes," maintained that the law was unconstitutional, because it failed to provide due-process protections to the fugitive and because, in any event, the national government lacked power to pass the act in the first place. Moreover, Chase asserted that the principle of Somerset had to hold, because when Matilda Lawrence came into Ohio, a free state, she became free. Slavery could only exist on the basis of positive law, and once she left the immediate jurisdiction of a slave state its power no longer controlled her. Chase made the essential point that freedom was national and supported by natural law. The local judge rejected these arguments; Matilda Lawrence's owner shipped her to the New Orleans slave market for sale.

The clamor over the Fugitive Slave Act mounted during the 1840s. Several northern states, for example, had earlier passed "personal liberty" laws that extended to accused fugitive slaves certain procedural safeguards, including jury trial and the writ of habeas corpus. These measures complicated the operation of the federal act that

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relied on state courts and officers to make it work. There was also the issue of whether states could impose these conditions on the execution of a federal law, and many southerners, though usually viewed as proponents of states' rights, protested as unconstitutional these exercises in local autonomy.

The question of state authority and the application of the Somerset principle converged in the 1842 case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania. Edward Prigg, a slaveholder's agent from Maryland, had seized a runaway in Pennsylvania and returned her to Maryland in violation of an 1826 Pennsylvania personal liberty law. When Prigg returned to the state he was arrested under that statute and charged with kidnapping. The matter quickly moved to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Joseph Story wrote the opinion for the Court, although six other justices entered opinions as well. Story, as we have already seen, was a strong nationalist and an advocate of uniformity in national legal standards. His opinion held the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 constitutional and the Pennsylvania personal liberty law of 1826 unconstitutional. The power over fugitive slaves, in the name of uniform national treatment and specified constitutional authority, rested exclusively with Congress. The decision was a major victory for the slave interests, and Story left no doubt about the power of the federal government to provide for the recapture of fugitive slaves. He described that power as "absolute and positive . . . pervading the whole Union with an equal and supreme force, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by State sovereignty or State legislation." ³¹ Story refused to apply Somerset, avoiding completely the issue of whether a slave entering free territory became free.

The antislavery bar seized from seeming defeat an innovative approach to the fugitive slave issue that Story's opinion had left open. Story was unclear about whether the states, given the exclusive authority of the federal government over fugitive slaves, could refuse to aid in implementing the federal law. The antislavery bar argued that if federal authority was exclusive, then the federal government would also have to provide the means of enforcement. Many northern states, at the urging of the moderale wing of the antislavery bar, passed new personal liberty laws that prohibited state officials from enforcing the federal fugitive slave law and denied the use of state facilities for that purpose. The national government bore not only the constitutional burden but also the administrative costs of recapturing fugitive slaves.

Southerners attempted to seal this loophole in the Compromise of 1850. Congress passed as part of that measure a new fugitive slave act that provided for the appointment, by federal circuit courts, of commissioners to decide whether a fugitive should be returned. The act did not require a jury trial, nor did it permit the alleged fugitive slave to testify, and the determination of the commissioner was conclusive against any writ of habeas corpus by a state. As an added incentive, the commissioner received a larger fee for returning the fugitive to slavery rather than freedom. The measure made the rendition of fugitives a ministerial rather than a judicial process, throttling continued direct legal intervention by antislavery moderates such as Chase.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 743