Show Me the Receipt from the Almighty!
Your God or Your Country: A Reflection on the legacy of the Fugitive Slave Acts
In the decades leading up to the civil war, standing against the constitution could get you ostracized, fined, imprisoned and worse. Standing with the constitution was safer and even for some financially lucrative. Your comfort in society revolved around where you stood on the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. These federal laws demanded the return of a runaway or fugitive slave to his servitude. Compassionate citizens could face fines and even imprisonment for refusing their civil duty.
Radley Balko in the Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York, Public Affairs Books, 2013) explains someone had only to claim a person of color was a slave for him or her to lose his or her freedom.
The accused would be arrested and sent back to a plantation, even if the claim were false. Of course, a slave catcher, the bounty hunters of that day, could make a great living just receiving monetary rewards.
If he were wrong and the captured person “belonged” to no one, the accused would remain a prisoner for six months and then be freed if no one came to claim the “slave”.
The revolutionary position was the one which treated the fugitive as another human being deserving of the freedoms granted only by the creator.
The revolutionary position was the one which treated the fugitive as another human being deserving of the freedoms granted only by the creator.
Openly disobeying federal law could cost you as much as five hundred dollars which in 1793 is the equivalent to over thirty thousand today.
Some states embraced the Fugitive Slave Acts openly and others, mostly in the North and especially in New England, rejected them. They passed laws which even made it a crime to follow the federal slave statutes enacted by congress and the first president and vice president of the United States.
Personal liberty laws criminalized obeying the federal law within a state’s borders. It is similar to the current issue over sanctuary cities versus immigration statutes.
Congress strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. President Millard Fillmore signed it into law. Fines raised to one thousand dollars which ironically is still about thirty thousand dollars today.
Remember that according to United States federal statute, slaves were property. The law treated them as beasts of burden and not as humans. A man or woman who escaped slavery and ran to those states that rejected the Fugitive Slave Act could be arrested by federal authorities. After a hearing, marshals remanded them back to their plantation. Radley Balko explains they had no right to witnesses on their behalf nor could they testify for their own defense. All that was needed to be so imprisoned was someone claiming that the person was a slave. The slave owner did not have to make the claim, anyone could make it and it did not even have to be true. There was no trial, no defense because the slave was not considered to be human but property.
Imagine if you had a horse run away and someone found it in the next state. All you would have to do is prove the horse was yours, if need be, in some kind of hearing and you could take it back to your farm. The same rule applied to the fugitive slaves.
Massachusetts was among the states to pass a personal liberty law that worked counter to the federal fugitive slave act of 1850. To understand the difference think to the current laws regarding marijuana use. Marijuana is still illegal on the federal level but it is legal in some state jurisdictions.
A person possessing pot in his home where local officials leave him alone because it is not against the law there could still suffer federal marshals barging down his door and arresting him for violating the federal statutes. If the person carried marijuana in his pocket and stepped into a national park, he is now in violation of federal law on federal property, even if the state property surrounds the park and is one footstep away.
This was the dichotomy between the state based personal liberty laws and the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.
Donald Weber in Civil Disobedience in America (New York, Cornell University Press, 1978) writes that in 1860 forty two people signed An Address to the People of Massachusetts in support of enforcing the constitutionally based federal law. Among the signers were two former Harvard presidents, a former Massachusetts chief justice, a former supreme court justice all who supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. They stood against the Personal Liberty Act of Massachusetts which forbade any commonwealth or civil agent from engaging in the enforcement of the fugitive slave act and no jails or prisons in the commonwealth could imprison anyone convicted of violation of the federal statute.
Alleged fugitive slaves caught in Massachusetts would have a right to a jury trial, to testify on their behalf and to bring witnesses for their defense. They were assumed to be freepersons. The “claimant” had to show proof of his “ownership”. He was not allowed to testify on his behalf and the proof had to be substantiated by two witnesses or the equivalent. This was the anti-slave position in New England, the one that stood against the Constitution of the United States.
L. Maria Child was an abolitionist, early suffragette, an author and an apparent firebrand of a woman who fought for the humanity of the slave. She wrote to the Massachusetts Legislature to demand that not only should the Fugitive Slave Law be disobeyed, but the personal liberty laws did not go far enough.
Writing with sarcasm that went right between the eyes of the members of the Massachusetts legislature of 1860, she made it clear no human being deserved to be treated as were the American people of color. Child even warned that after a day of working in the sun any one of those in that statehouse chamber, including her, could be sent back to the south under the fugitive slave act.
Some shadow of justice [Massachusetts] grants, in as much as her legislature have passed what is called a Personal Liberty Bill, securing trial by jury to those claimed as slaves. Certainly, it is something gained, especially for those who may get brown by working in the sunshine, to prevent our southern masters from taking any of us, at a moment’s notice, and dragging us off into perpetual bondage. Itis something gained to require legal proof that a man is a slave before he was given up to arbitrary torture in unrecompensed toil. But is that the measure of justice becoming the character of a free Commonwealth? “Prove that the man is property, according to your laws and I will drive him into your cattle-pen with sword and bayonet,” is what Massachusetts practically says to southern tyrants. “Show me a bill of sale from the Almighty!” is what she ought to say. No other proof should be considered valid in a Christian country. –The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act: An Appeal to the Legislators of Massachusetts by L. Maria Child (Boston; The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860)
She even went on to quote a third century Catholic bishop — Gregory who “rebuked the sin of slave holding” and commanded that only God can possess a human being.
That position contradicted those who supported the Fugitive Slave Laws as a duty of obedience one had to government and to God.
The Reverend John C. Lord, D.D. pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church in Buffalo, N.Y., who railed against Catholicism, made it clear that it was the duty of Christians to obey government even if the law was considered unjust. Further, to call the law sinful was disobedient to God.
To allege that there is a higher law which makes slavery per se sinful, and that all legislation that protects the rights of masters , and enjoins the re-delivery of the slave void and without authority, and maybe conscientiously resisted by arms and violence, is an infidel position, which is contradicted by both Testaments; — which may be taught in the gospel of Jean Jacques Rousseau and in the revelations of the skeptics in Jacobins who promised France, half a century ago, universal equality and fraternity; A gospel whose baptism was blood, a revelation who sacrificed sacrament was crime; but it cannot be found in The Gospel of Jesus Christ or in the revelation of God’s will to men. “The Higher Law” in its Application to the Fugitive Slave Bill. A sermon on the duties men owe to God and to governments. by Rev. John C. Lord, D.D. (Buffalo, G.H. Derby and Co., 1851)
Lord’s position was that the Christian had the duty to obey the Fugitive Slave Law even if he or she was against slavery. St. Thomas Aquinas as a Catholic influence would differ, of course. He taught that no one has a duty to obey an unjust law.
Now in 2020, the era leads us to look back and reflect on where we would stand then, we can then challenge ourselves on where we must stand now.
Finally, anytime you have a situation where someone is to be declared guilty in one form of another without the benefit of trial, especially, but not exclusively in a court of law, you may be looking at the template laid down in the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.