The Fugitive Slave Law Split the Nation

A U.S. Marshall and a slave catcher attempt to capture a Black woman and child under the Fugitive Slave Act in this cartoon.

The infamous Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress on September 18, 1850.  It was one part of a larger Compromise of 1850 meant to ease tensions between slave and free states.  It did not work.  In fact attempts at enforcement of the law enraged many Northerners who would otherwise have been content to let slavery be out of sight and mind in the South.

A Fugitive Slave Law had been in the Federal statutes since 1793.  It was an enforcement provision for Article 4, Section 2 of the Constitution, which required the return of runaway slaves and was passed at a time when slavery was still legal in most states on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.  But one by one Northern states had abandoned slavery.  Within the next decade the last slaves in some gradual emancipation plans would be freed.  Many Northern states had fairly sizable populations of Free Blacks.  Southern states, however, with the introduction of a wide spread cotton economy were more dependent on slavery than ever and the end of the international slave trade had cut off a supply of fresh bodies from Africa and the Caribbean.

Slavery was not only disappearing in the North, but public opinion was also swinging against it, particularly in New England and those states carved from the old Northwest Territories that were heavily settled by the New England diaspora.  Many states had taken actions to blunt the enforcement of the 1793 law.  Several had enacted Personal Liberty Laws by which a captured Negro could demand a jury trial where the claimant would have to prove that he or she was legal owner.  This was to prevent free Blacks in the North from being kidnapped and taken south to be sold into slavery—a common practice among slave chasers.  Other laws forbad state and local officials from rendering assistance to slave chasers or the use of local jails to hold them.  This practice was upheld by an 1842 Supreme Court decision, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which essentially gutted enforcement of the 1793 law in much of the North.

Beyond legal barriers, there was growing popular resistance to slavery which manifested itself in the network of the Underground Railroad which actively assisted fleeing slaves to reach either Canada or settle in relatively safe portions of the North under assumed identities.  In several cities citizens actively interfered with slave catchers.  All of this, of course, infuriated the South.

The Underground Railroad abetting and harboring escaped slaves on their flight to freedom was a manifestation of growing opposition to slavery and slave catchers in the north.

Other issues were also inflaming North/South tensions, principally whether slavery would be extended in the vast territories obtained in the Mexican War.  The South wanted all of the land opened to slavery—or failing that something like an extension of the Missouri Compromise line that would allow territories to the south of the same or similar line eventually be admitted to the Union as slave states.  They even hoped to possibly divide Texas into two or more states and break off southern California somewhere north of Los Angeles.  That would give the South and slave holding border states control of the Senate, and by extension the Federal government itself. 

Northerners, on the other hand, wanted to exclude slavery from all newly organized territories and keep Texas and California unified, with the understanding that California would enter the Union as a free state, balancing slave holding Texas.

Henry Clay arguing for compromise on the Senate floor.  His Whig rivals, Daniel Websrer in the front row just behind the man standing, and John C. Calhoun glaring at the left of the three men on the upper right.

President Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War and himself a Louisiana planter and slave holder, stood with the North in opposing the extension of slavery.  His Whig party was becoming unraveled over the issue.  Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a borderer state Whig who had long dreamed of the Presidency, set out to craft a compromise early in the year.  But with the President of his own party in opposition, the compromise fell apart in the Senate.

When the new session of Congress convened in March Democrat Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Massachusetts Whig Daniel Webster—Clay’s long time rival for party leadership—advanced a modified version of Clay’s compromise proposals.  It varied from Clay’s failed version mostly in the disposal of the thorny issue of Texas.  The new version was mainly crafted by Douglas and incorporated the Democratic platform principle of Popular Sovereignty—that residents of Territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed—for the two proposed Territories carved from Texas claims—Utah and New Mexico.  Mormon controlled Utah would definitely opt to be a free territory, and everyone knew that it was unlikely that sparsely populated New Mexico, which was totally unsuitable to a plantation economy, would elect to allow slavery.  California would be admitted to the Union undivided as a free state.

New Englanders turned on their long-time political hero Daniel Webster for agreeing to include a tough Fugitive Slave Law in a new compromise to "save the Union."

Debate was fierce.  Most northern Whigs led by William Steward of New York were bitterly opposed because the package did not include Wilmot Proviso, a long sought provision that would have permanently banned slavery from territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War.  Even though no new slave Territories or States were created, the application of the principle of Popular Sovereignty left the possibility open in the future.  They were also outraged by the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Act.

On the other hand Southern firebrands led by John C. Calhoun were just as voraciously opposed because they did not get the division of California or any new slave holding Territories.  They also had to give up the continuation of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, although slavery itself would be preserved there.

In his last great political battle South Carolina's John C. Calhoun led the firebrands in opposition to the compromise because it didn't guarantee the extension of slavery.

Numerous alternative plans were advanced and beaten back.  Douglas and Webster, with the support of Clay, had to stitch together a Senate majority from Northern Democrats, moderate Southern Democrats, and Southern Whigs.  The opposition was split between two extremes, Northern Whigs on one hand, and southern firebrands on the other.

The compromise got a boost when Taylor died suddenly and his Vice President Millard Fillmore ascended to the White House.  Fillmore was one of Webster’s few Northern Whig allies and supported the compromise.  Douglas divided the proposal into five separate bills from an original omnibus bill, and carefully crafted narrow majorities for each part, with each bill getting support from a slightly different combination of forces.  It was precarious, but it worked.

Rising Democratic star and leading proponent of Popular Sovereignty Stephen A. Douglas devised the plan to split the compromise into separate parts and build different majorities in support of each.

The bills, passed independently between September 9 and 20 and quickly signed into law by President Fillmore included:

• The admission of California as a free state.
• The abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia.
• The organization Territory of New Mexico (including present-day Arizona) and the Territory of Utah under the rule of popular sovereignty.
• The enactment of Fugitive Slave Act requiring all U.S. citizens to assist in the return of runaway slaves.
• Texas ceding of much of its western land claims in exchange for $10 million to pay off its national debt.

Douglas and Webster thought they had crafted a compromise which saved the union.  Instead, they reaped the whirlwind, especially because of the onerous provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act.

The Act made any Federal Marshal or other official who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave liable to a fine of $1,000. Local law enforcement was required to arrest anyone suspected of being a runaway slave on no more evidence than a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership. The suspected slave could not ask for a jury trial or testify on his or her own behalf. Anyone aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to a six month imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Officers who captured a fugitive slave were entitled to a bonus or promotion for their work. Slave owners only needed to supply an affidavit to a Federal Marshal to capture an escaped slave and since a suspected slave was not eligible for a trial to prove his status, many free blacks could be conscripted into slavery.

Outrage in the North, particularly in New England, was fierce.  Daniel Webster, the political hero of the region for more than 40 years, was excoriated as a traitor.  The hand of Abolitionists, a previously despised minority, was greatly strengthened.  Some Abolitionists even contemplated northern secession from the union in response to the Act and the still open possibility of the extension of slavery into new territories.  Even Ralph Waldo Emerson flirted with the idea. 

Abolitionists sometimes published warnings interfering with slave chasers, a source of outrage in the South.

Citizens of Boston and other towns organized to oppose slave catchers and interfere with their work in every way possible.  Handbills were circulated warning free Blacks that the local police were cooperating with slave catchers under the law.

Politically, the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law spelled the end of the Whigs as a national party.  Northern Whigs swung to the new Free Soil Party and four years later into the new Republican Party alongside anti-slavery northern Democrats.  Southern Whigs were re-absorbed into the Democratic Party from which most of them had originated.  Democrats were riven by sectional conflicts themselves.

Whatever “peace” might have been bought fell apart four years later as the future of Kansas turned on the principle of Popular Sovereignty leading to a local civil war as slave holders and Free Soilers rushed to the territory to attempt to control the Territorial Government.

From a modern perspective, it is useful to compare the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act to the Arizona anti-immigration legislation of a few years back which became a model for even more draconian legislation in Tea Party dominated states—most of them in the Deep South. There were many parallels including requiring local police to act on mere suspicion, and the denial of detainees of adequate rights to prove their status, thus inevitably leading to the detention deportation of legal immigrants and even citizens.  And citizens aiding suspected illegals would be criminalized themselves.  Many of the more draconian provisions of the anti-immigration laws were gutted by Federal Courts, but other onerous provisions remain in force and right wing zealots continually demand harsher measures.  With some armed “volunteers” took up patrolling the borders.

Donald Trump and his allies use sophisticated AI to stir divisions over issues like immigration, reproductive rights, and guns to bring modern America to the eve of a second Civil War.

Donald Trump made the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants and the erection of an impenetrable boarder wall the center piece of his campaigns.  Meanwhile many Americans have been revolted and repelled by the ugly rhetoric.  Regional and philosophic divisions are sharper than ever.  Trump and his allies are encouraging violence against his opponents.   The bonkers Haitian-immigrants-are-pet-eaters in Ohio has resulted in a deluge of bomb threats in Springfield targeting city officials, police, schools, and individuals and organizations in the hope that vigilantism and terrorism will spread to efforts to discourage Kamala Haris voters and prevent her from taking office.  It is a rehearsal for a second Civil War.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

How Local Hero Millard Fillmore Turned into a National Joke

Millard Fillmore--a failed President and Alec Balwdin look-alike.

The ghost of Millard Fillmore may be resting more comfortably since two Republican Presidents—George W. Bush and Donald Trump have easily dislodged him the list of five worst Presidents where he dwelled for so long.  Some writers have compared Fillmore to Trump for his disastrous presidency’s cause of the disintegration of the Whig Party and because of his opportunistic acceptance of the American Party—Know Nothings—nomination.  But unlike Trump as we shall see Fillmore had a long and honored career as a capable and honest lawyer, public servant and office holder, and philanthropic community leader.  And he explicitly denounced the Know Nothing anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic platform despite accepting the nomination.

Unitarian Universalists like to brag about the distinguished folks connected to us.  We usually boast of five U.S. Presidents—Thomas Jefferson (if you count his theology and his own claims, not membership in a congregation), John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and William Howard Taft.  Oh, did I forget to mention Fillmore.  We tend to mutter that one under our breath.

Fillmore is not only the butt of many jokes but is still high on any list of the worst Presidents in history.  His less than one full term in office was so disastrous that his party the Whigs virtually disintegrated.

But they are proud of him in his adopted hometown of Buffalo, New York.  They hold an annual memorial service at his grave site on his typically frigid birthday. 

Millard Fillmore was born in very humble circumstances—in an honest-to-Gwad log cabin on January 7, 1800 in the Finger Lakes area of Cayuga County.  He was the seventh of nine children to  struggling settlers from New England.

He was entirely self educated, learning to read from the three books in his father’s cabin—The Bible, an almanac, and a hymnal.  Bound out as an apprentice to a cloth maker/weaver at the age of 14, he earned enough to buy a dictionary and read definitions between tending the carding machines.  In the spring he would be sent home to help with the planting.  After moving his apprenticeship to another firm in New Hope, he was able to attend the New Hope Academy briefly. In 1819 He fell in love with his teacher, Abigail Powers.

He worked part of a winter as a rural schoolmaster himself to earn enough money to purchase his release from his apprenticeship and went to reading law with Judge Walter Wood of Montville.  He moved to Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie then just on the cusp of a great boom as the outlet of the Erie Canal to finish his law studies with Asa Rice and Joseph Clary and was admitted to the bar in 1823.

Buffalo, New York at the time when Fillmore was establishing himself there.

Fillmore hung out his shingle in East Aurora, about twenty miles south of Buffalo and sent for Abigail, who had been waiting for him to establish himself.  They were married in 1826.  He prospered and his reputation as a lawyer grew.

In 1828 he won his first election for the state Assembly.  He ran on the locally powerful Anti-Masonic Party ticket but supported John Quincy Adams for re-election under the National Republican banner, the forerunner of the Whigs.  In his three one year terms he managed to pass legislation ending imprisonment for debt in New York and tried to end the practice of requiring religious oaths to serve in public office.

The First Unitarian Society of Buffalo where Fillmore was a leading member.

The family moved to bustling Buffalo in 1831.  He became one of the founding members of the new Unitarian congregation in that city the same year.  His wife, a Baptist, refused to participate, perhaps putting a strain on their marriage. 

Elected to Congress in 1832 as a National Republican with local Anti-Masonic support, he joined the new coalition of Whigs under the leadership of Henry Clay forming to oppose the policies of Andrew Jackson.  That alienated his Anti-Masonic supporters and he declined to be nominated again.

Instead in 1834 Fillmore joined the most prestigious law firm in western New York while he worked to bring his old supporters into the Whigs.  That didn’t prove too hard as the Anti-Masonic Party was disintegrating.  At the time Fillmore was widely known for his liberal views, including opposition to the expansion of slavery.

He was returned to Congress as a Whig in 1836 with the support of local abolitionists.  In his three terms Fillmore opposed the Annexation of Texas as a slave state, and regularly supported his old hero, John Quincy Adams, in his fruitless efforts to lay anti-slavery petitions before Congress.  Elevated to Chair of the Ways and Means Committee under Speaker of the House Clay, he helped move the Whig agenda including the protective tariff.

Fillmore opted out of a run for a fourth term in hopes of being named Vice-President on a Whig ticket with Clay.  But New York Whig boss Thrulow Weed asked him to step aside for firebrand abolitionist William Steward. Instead, he ran for governor and was defeated.

Back home he founded the University of Buffalo in 1846.  The same year he was elected to the new post of Comptroller and used that office to modernize the New York banking system, making it a model for Whig proposals for national reform.

During the Mexican War, which he opposed, Fillmore became an officer in the New York State Militia as befitting an elected official of his stature.  It must be said that on his watch no Mexican depredations were even attempted in western New York.

Fillmore, an anti-slavery northerner lent balance to the 1848 Whig ticket topped by Mexican War Hero and Louisiana slave owner Zachary Taylor.

In 1848 the Whigs, hungry for victory, bypassed party leaders Clay and Daniel Webster to nominate a popular war hero, General Zachary Taylor, a slave-holding Louisiana plantation owner.  Party leaders turned to Fillmore, a northern anti-slavery man to balance the ticket.  The pair campaigned on a pledge to serve all of the country and overcome sectionalism.

Immediately upon taking office the new administration was faced with a full-blown crisis as southern states threatened to secede from the Union unless all the land stolen from Mexico including California, New Mexico and parts of four other future states were open to slavery.  In Congress Henry Clay cobbled together yet another compromise to try to reconcile North and South.  His Omnibus Bill which, among other things, would allow California to be admitted as a Free State, leave the future of Kansas and Nebraska to a decision by voters in those territories—popular sovereignty, and the Fugitive Slave Act.  Taylor surprised everyone by opposing any extension of slavery and was soon at odds with his own party in Congress.

Then one hot morning in the summer of 1850 Taylor sat down to a big bowl of chilled strawberries and cream, which killed him, or so the story goes.  Millard Fillmore was an accidental President.

But he was much more tractable than Taylor.  He threw his support around Clay’s Omnibus Bill despite the poison pill of the Fugitive Slave law, despised in New England and much of the rest of the North.  When the bill bogged down, he threw his support to Democrat Stephen Douglas’s plan to pass five separate bills incorporating most of Clay’s proposals.  By cobbling different coalitions to pass each bill, all five arrived with a thump on Fillmore’s desk.

He signed the first four, but briefly dithered on the Fugitive Slave Act which both offended his own anti-slavery views and, he knew, probably doomed his political future if he signed it.  In the name of “national unity” and the greater good, Fillmore swallowed hard and signed the act.  He thought he was bringing about sectional peace, but only lit the long fuse of a gigantic bomb.

Both sides hated him.  Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the leader of anti-slavery Whigs denounced him, “Better for [Fillmore] had he never been born; better for his memory and the good name of his children, had he never been President.”  Neither were the firebrands of the south appeased.  The governor of South Carolina threatened immediate secession.  Fillmore responded by re-enforcing garrisons at Ft. Sumter and other southern posts with Federal troops.

His party shattered three ways.  Southern Whigs were driven to the welcoming arms of the Democrats, abolitionists seethed and began to plot a new party, and a straggle of “moderates” supported, tepidly, the President.

Despite this, Fillmore was in some ways a successful executive.  Coming after a string of weak, incompetent, or foolish Presidents, he was a capable administrator.  And he enjoyed several major foreign policy successes, including diffusing crises that might have led to war with Portugal, France, or England.  Of course, his able Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, got most of the credit.

In 1852 both Fillmore and Webster wanted the Whig nomination, for what it was worth.  Neither would make way for the other.  Party leaders tried once again to put forth a war hero, General Winfield Scott.  Fillmore refused to endorse the ticket.  Scott was creamed, carrying only four states.  Democrat Franklin Pierce moved into the White House and promptly tried to drink himself to death after his family was killed in a railroad accident.  

Fillmore, an anti-slavery northerner lent balance to the 1848 Whig ticket topped by Mexican War Hero and Louisiana slave owner Zachary Taylor.

Fillmore returned to Buffalo to practice law and resume the duties of Chancellor of the University of Buffalo, a position he held in abstencia all during his terms as Vice President and President.  Abigail died the next year leaving him a widower with two children.

He plotted a political comeback.  Unlike most northern Whigs, including his closest political associates, he refused to join the new Republican Party believing its anti-slavery position would fuel sectional conflict.  That was alright with the Republicans, who didn’t want him anyway.

Fillmore consoled himself with a Grand Tour of Europe.  He was still abroad when the new American Party offered to make him their candidate.  The American Party was the political arm of the rabidly anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Know Nothing Movement.  In New York State some former anti-Masonic leaders joined out of sheer opportunism.  The new party was aware that Fillmore did not share their views on either immigration or the Catholic Church, but they were eager to field a candidate who would, they hope, bring them national attention.

Fillmore not only refused to campaign on the Know Nothing platform, he publicly refuted it.  He campaigned on a program of regional reconciliation, tariff protectionism, and liberal banking laws that were essentially the old Whig platform.  Most historians say Fillmore was crushed, carrying only Maryland.  But the maiden efforts of the new Republicans under John C. Fremont were only marginally better.  Hapless Democrat James Buchannan won election handily.  But Fillmore won 21% of the popular vote, one of the best showings of any third party candidate ever.

Fillmore’s association with the vile Know Nothings, despite being merely political opportunism, sealed the scorn of most historians.

Once again back in Buffalo Fillmore consoled himself by marrying a wealthy widow, Caroline McIntosh in 1858.  Previously a man of only moderate wealth, his new bride brought enough assets to erect a fine new mansion which became the center of Buffalo society.  The former President busied himself in good works and basked in the esteem of his townsfolk.  In addition to his continued service to the University, he founded and was president of the Buffalo Historical Society, the Buffalo General Hospital, and the Buffalo Club.

In 1860 he still refused to support the Republicans and denounced Abraham Lincoln as a dangerous extremist.  Despite this when Lincoln showed up in Buffalo on his circuitous route to assume his duties in Washington in 1861, Fillmore escorted the President elect to services at the Unitarian Church, just has he had done nearly twenty years earlier for John Quincy Adams.

During the war he remained critical of the Administration but was an ardent Unionist.  He assumed the command of the Union Continentals, a unit of home guard militia for men over the age of 45.

Fillmore began to retire from public business when his wife’s health began to decline in the late 1860’s.  He died in his beloved Buffalo of a stroke on March 8, 1874 after uttering his stirring last words,  “The nourishment [soup] is palatable.”

A New York Air Force National Guardsman was one of the wreath layers at Filmore's annual Buffalo commemoration a few years ago.

He was buried under an impressive obelisk at Forest Lawn Cemetery, where local dignitaries gather annually to honor the President most of the rest of the nation has forgotten.