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.

 

Three Illinois Poets and Different Takes on Abraham Lincoln-—National Poetry Month 2024

One of many popular death bed pictures of Lincoln showing an impossible assemblage in the tiny back bedroom where he was laid at an angle in a too-small bed.  In reality Secretary of State Seward, shown prominently front and center with his hand on foot of the bedstead, was grievously injured by another member of the assassination plot and was unable to attend.  Secretary of War Stanton, who quickly took charge of things, soon sent “that hysterical woman”, Mary Todd Lincoln, away.  Son Tad was never allowed at his father’s bedside.  Vice President Andrew Johnson, who survived a botched attempt on his life, was not even called to the room.  Stanton, Robert Todd Lincoln, and three doctors were among those in the room when Lincoln breathed his last.  Stanton may, or may not, have said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Note—Just days after the anniversary of the end of the Civil War and before the assassination of Abraham Lincoln 6 days later is an apt time to compare the views a three remarkable poets.

Three of my favorite American poets were all from Illinois and were roughly contemporary.  It is more than simple parochialism—Illinoisans do not have the breast beating pride of place of Virginians or Texans or the sometimes snooty Pilgrim pride of Bay Staters.  Indeed, Illinois folk are often embarrassed to admit that they come from a state best known nationally for political corruption and convict governors, and Chicago crime. No, it’s because the three poets—Sandburg, Lindsay, and Masters—brought fresh ideas and forms to poetry which had long been the seen as the exclusive provenance of the Eastern Elite,  which was choked on convention and the long, inescapable shadow of Romanticism.  They saw things through iconoclastic eyes, wrote in simple, straight-from-the-shoulder verse liberated from ten dollar words and classic allusions.  Each was, in his own way, a Poet of the People.  Yet each had a unique style and particular concerns.  They did not represent a school or movement.  They were simply themselves.

Naturally each was drawn in particularly personal ways to the topic of Lincoln who was not only close to them geographically but was personally known by people close to each of them. 

                                           Carl Sandburg.

Of course no writer is more identified with Abraham Lincoln than Carl Sandburg whose magnificent multi-volume biographies are the most beautiful and moving, if not the most academically useful, of all of the many accounts of his life.  This poem was written in 1925 but not published in Sandburg’s life time.  He—or more likely his editors felt that the blunt description of Lincoln’s death and the preparation of his body for the famous long train ride back to Springfield was still too traumatizing for tender readers of verse.  I find it sobering and powerful and then lifted by a kind of defiance to an unjust world.  Very Sandburg.

Journey and Oath

 

When Abraham Lincoln received a bullet in the head and was taken to the Peterson house across the street,
He passed on and was swathed in emulsions and prepared for a journey to New York, Niagara, across Ohio, Indiana, back to Illinois-

As he lay looking life-like yet not saying a word,
Lay portentous and silent under a glass cover,
Lay with oracular lips still as a winter leaf,
Lay deaf to the drums of regiments coming and going,
Lay blind to the weaving causes of work or war or peace,
Lay as an inextinguishable symbol of toil, thought, sacrifice-

There was an oath in the heart of this man and that:
By God, I’ll go as a Man;
When my time comes I’ll be ready.
I shall keep the faith that nothing
is impossible with man, that one
or two illusions are good as money.

By God, I’ll be true to Man
As against hog, louse, fox, snake, wolf,
As against these and their counterparts
in the breast of Man.
By God, I’ll fight for Man
As against famine, flood, storm,
As against crop gambling, job gambling,
As against bootlickers on the left hand,
As against bloodsuckers on the right hand,
As against the cannibalism of the exploitation
of man by man,
As against insecurity of the sanctities of human life.

—Carl Sandburg

Vachel Lindsay was born in Lincoln’s adopted hometown of Springfield and raised in a big old house the next block over from the Governor’s mansion.  Unlike some poets who rebel against their roots and try to distance themselves from what they may consider their mundane or plebian roots, Lindsay loved—nay adored—his hometown.  He reveled in its lore, it tree shaded streets, its people great and common, White and Black.  He knew well Lincoln’s haunts on the Square across from the old sandstone Capital, the frame house far simpler than his own, the Depot from which he departed alive for the last time and to which he returned amid pomp in an ornate box.  He knew the old men, bent, broken, bearded, and gray who as lads had marched smartly away to fight in Mr. Lincoln’s War.  And, of course, he knew the grand mausoleum the city and its citizens had built for him, fit for a pharaoh of old the locals said, on hill at the cemetery on the edge of town.

Vachael Lindsay, the man of Springfield, photographed in the yard of his family home.

It was no wonder that when Lindsay thought of Springfield, he thought of Lincoln —and thought of him as a specter risen from his tomb, especially as he wrote during the fresh carnage of a World War.

 

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

(In Springfield, Illinois)

It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,

Near the old court-house pacing up and down.

 

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards

He lingers where his children used to play,

Or through the market, on the well-worn stones

He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.

 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,

A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl

Make him the quaint great figure that men love,

The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.

 

He cannot sleep upon his hillside now.

He is among us:—as in times before!

And we who toss and lie awake for long

Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door. 

 

His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings.

Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?

Too many peasants fight, they know not why,

Too many homesteads in black terror weep.

 

The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.

He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main.

He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now

The bitterness, the folly and the pain.

 

He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn

Shall come;—the shining hope of Europe free;

The league of sober folk, the Workers’ Earth,

Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea.

 

It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,

That all his hours of travail here for men

Seem yet in vain.   And who will bring white peace

That he may sleep upon his hill again.

 

—Vachel Lindsay

 

                        Edgar Lee Masters in middle age.

The odd man out here is Edgar Lee Masters, the classic freethinker and iconoclast who had once been Clarence Darrow’s law partner and was best known as the author of one of the single best volumes of American poetry ever, The Spoon River Anthology.  As far as I know Masters never wrote a poem with Lincoln as the central subject.  The closest he came was in references made by some of the denizens of the Spoon River graveyard who tell their stories in the two volumes he wrote about the mythical downstate community muddled on his own home town.  The best known of these was Anne Rutledge.

 

Anne Rutledge

 

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficent face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

 

—Edgar Lee Masters

This is surprising.  After all Masters was half a generation older than Sandburg and Lindsay.  And he grew up in Petersburg—his Spoon River—in Menard County quite near Lincoln’s New Salem.  His beloved grandfather Squire David Masters served with Lincoln in the Blackhawk War, owned a farm within half a day’s walk from New Salem, and at least once hired the young lawyer when he was just starting out.  His father, Hardin Masters had once been a law partner of Lincoln’s last partner and biographer William Herndon.  He knew many who had known Lincoln and told stories about his country wit.  He was surrounded by the near cult-like worship of Lincoln that thrived in Illinois in the post-Civil War years.

 

Masters hope to destroy the cult that had grown up around Lincoln with his scathing biography.  Instead he destroyed his own reputation.

Yet in 1931 Masters published the most scathing biography of Lincoln yet written by a Northerner.  Lincoln: The Man was so venomous that it outdid the movement led by un-reconstructed Confederates like Lyon G. Tyler and Mildred Lewis Rutherford in their books of the previous decade to cast Lincoln as the black hearted villain of the Civil War who had loosed unnecessary devastation on the nation and crushed a freedom loving, agrarian society.  Sandburg, who had been friendly with Masters when he first came to Chicago, wrote sadly on the flyleaf of his copy of the book, that it was a “long sustained Copperhead hymn of hate reversing the views of a Masters I knew well 10 and 15 years before he wrote these sickly venomous pages.”  A New York Times reviewer compared the book to the “Indiana Knights of the Golden Circle”—the Ku Klux Klan that had thrived in that state in the ‘20’s.

How could this be?  Masters was, after all, the friend and associate of Darrow and a famous liberal.  He was an admirer of Eugene V. Debs and Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, an admirer of the great liberal Freethinker statesman Robert Ingersoll, a friend of labor, and the ardent opponent of oligarchic monopolists and their Trusts.

It turns out that although personally friendly to young Lincoln, Masters’s Grandfather was, like many of the settlers of Downstate Illinois, an ardent Democrat casting himself as an agrarian republican in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and the enemy of Lincoln’s Whigs and new Republicans as the inheritors of Alexander Hamilton’s elite and moneyed Federalists, the champion of national state power over the states, high tariffs, and the hated monopolistic Bank.  Squire Davis actively campaigned against Lincoln in his race for State Legislature and later as a member of the legislature himself in 1855 did not vote for Lincoln in the election for U. S. Senator.  He was a devoted support of Lincoln’s long-time rival Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant.

Masters grew up idolizing Douglas as the clear inheritor of Jefferson’s mantle and a brilliant man with a clear eyed, practical way to save the Union when fanatics North and South were losing their minds.  In his view the heroic Douglas was betrayed by faithless Democrats and overwhelmed with the money and power of northern merchants and industrialists backing Lincoln.  Then after a stinging loss Douglas sacrificed himself trying to save the Union that Lincoln and the Republicans imperiled dying of strain and overwork just months later.  Douglas was, in Masters’s eyes, a martyr.

He watched with resentment as Lincoln's cult grew and his lion seemed neglected and dishonored.  In 1922 all of this came out in his novel Children of the Market Place which was narrated by an Englishman who migrates to Illinois in 1833.  He comes to admire Douglas but was unaware of the scruffy upstart Lincoln until he attended one of the Lincoln Douglas Debates at Alton after returning from a trip home to England.  He finds Douglas’s arguments irrefutable and Lincoln’s silly and fanatical.  At first repelled by the bumpkin with the high thin voice, in the course of the argument he begins to appreciate Lincoln’s eloquence.  But for him it is all mere theater and lawyerly histrionics.  Still later the narrator will hear Lincoln at Gettysburg and admit that he has a “great soul” but a foolish mind.  At the end of the novel during the labor turbulence of the 1890s, the old man sits at Douglas’s tomb and weeps for what was lost.

In this view Lincoln was somewhat sympathetic, a misguided man with a good heart and natural gifts but the moral and intellectual inferior of a real giant.

In less than a decade Masters’s view of Lincoln would sour even more.  The intervening years were filled with personal and national disappointments for him.  After the heady triumph of The Spoon River Anthology, each successive volume of his poetry sold fewer copies and the critics grew harsher while rivals like Sandburg and Lindsay prospered.  His novels were failures and his plays closed as fast as they opened.  Not only was he past his glory, but he was also dismissed as dated and passé.

Meanwhile in his view Lincoln’s Republicans had become the private political machine of the Trusts and malefactors of great wealth.  They had made possible Prohibition which unleashed unheard of violent crime and corruption.  And then the bankers and speculators had driven the country to the Crash and Great Depression for which the common people—farmers and workers paid the price.  And it all, in his mind started with Lincoln and the defeat of the last Jeffersonian knight.  It was a very bitter man who wrote the new supposedly idol toppling biography.

Of course outside of Confederate die-hards and the coterie of historians and cultural manipulators—think Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind—busy trying to snatch victory from defeat by recasting the narrative of the central event in American history and its aftermath, the book was roundly condemned in the northern and liberal circles that Masters cared for the most.  His reputation, what was left of it, was essentially destroyed.  He lived on until 1950 and wrote several more books, including a biography of Lindsay.  There would even be occasional honors, but he had permanently lost his place in the cultural sun.

For his part, Sandburg’s  Abraham Lincoln: The War Years  published in 1939, a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning two volume biography of the young man Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, did much to undo any damage wrecked by Masters.  Since then hundreds of books have been written about the complex and somewhat mysterious Lincoln who has been called “the most written about public figure since Jesus.”

Hagiographies have gone out of style, but most writers find much to admire in the public and private man.  In recent years a half dozen major biographies have appeared along with specialized analysis of parts of the Lincoln legacy like Doris Kerns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals which Barack Obama famously studied before naming Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State.  Novelists from Gore Vidal on the left to William Safire on the right to Jerome Charyn in the realm of the soul have plumbed his depths.

Of course the rise of the New Right has been a battle between those who try to paint themselves as the true inheritors of Lincoln and his party with the Southerners who have infiltrated and taken over the Republican Party making it over into the mirror image of the Jim Crow Democrats.  In the North, libertarian neo-Confederates, alleged intellectuals at places like the Heartland Institute, resurrected Masters’s criticism pretty much intact and launched new attacks on Lincoln’s reputation.

My bet is their puny efforts will be no more successful in the long run.

As for me, I will always love and revisit Spoon River, but when it comes to Lincoln, I will stand with Sandburg and Lindsay.