Fugitive Slave Act 1850

Introduction

Why did Southerners seek a new fugitive slave act as part of the Compromise of 1850? What did the act materially contribute to the protection of the South's "peculiar institution"? Historians generally have been quite coy about describing southern motives for demanding the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Yet the passage of the fugitive slave act as part of the compromise remains a puzzle for several reasons.

First, the compromise's admittance of California not merely tipped the U.S.

Senate's sectional balance between free and slave states against slaveholders but did so in a way that, ex post, proved to be permanent. The free territories of Minnesota and Oregon would be applying for statehood within a decade. True, to offset California, the compromise opened the Utah and New Mexico territories to slavery under the aegis of popular sovereignty, but few anticipated that slaveholders would be able to take full advantage of this concession in those arid lands. This led one historian, William W.

Analysis

Freehling (1994, p. 170), to conclude, "southern congressmen surrendered California to the North in exchange for a new Fugitive Slave Law." Second, the measure seemed so obviously proslavery, in a draconian fashion, that many appear to believe that southern demands required no explanation at all. Often general surveys, such as David M. Potter's classic, The Impending Crisis (1976; pp.

112-3, 130-40; see also McPherson 1982, pp. 75-9), proceed as if rendering an account of the historical antecedents--in which the Supreme Court's 1842 decision in Prigg v.

Pennsylvania resulted in a spate of northern personal liberty laws that undermined the effectiveness of the original fugitive-slave statute--is sufficient unto itself.

Third, these very same scholars, however, virtually dismiss the problem of runaway slaves. The number of runaways -- perhaps a thousand per year -- seems too small relative to a total slave population reaching nearly four million by 1860 to have made much difference. As Peter Geyl (1961, p. 198) asks, "were a few hundred fugitive slaves worth the risk of getting enmeshed in a destructive Civil War?" Finally, many historians follow Potter in arguing that the Fugitive Slave Act was counterproductive. Because it provoked northern opposition against slavery, it contributed to the crisis between the sections.

We are thus left with the paradox of slaveholders insisting upon a measure that was simultaneously unnecessary and counter-productive. Why did they foist such an odious statute upon Northerners if the main consequence was to turn many against the South who were otherwise indifferent? One solution that historians have offered to this paradox is to emphasize the symbolic nature of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Southerners "clamored . . . for a stronger fugitive slave law," writes James M. McPherson (1988, p. 79), "less for practical advantage than as a matter of principle.... [N]orthern aid to escaping slaves was an insult to southern honor." In combination with the above observations, this hypothesis implies that the motives for the act were psychological and irrational. The Fugitive Slave Act becomes another aspect of an exaggerated sense of southern ...