rusty: "You will notice in my last "paragraph" of Section 5 the requirement of citizens to aid in the execution of the law.
That was the part of the law that I objected to in my post above. "
This and other provisions of the 1850 law show that it required not just Federal enforcement of Fugitive Slave Laws but also state and local enforcement.
Of course, some northern states did object and passed "personal liberty laws" attempting to protect fugitive slaves.
But if you look at the list of those northern states, you'll see that without exception they were all Far Northern Tier states -- in other words none bordered a slave-holding state, meaning any fugitives from the Deep South (i.e., South Carolina) must first run the gauntlet of slave-catchers in the Upper South, then Border States and finally those Lower-Tier northern states which did help enforce Fugitive Slave Laws.
Point is: few if any Deep South slaves ever escaped to freedom in the Far North or Canada.
I thought that this thread had assumed room temperature ;-)
I’ve read through the added posts and would redirect y’all to my post #306.
I expressed surprise that any southron partisan would be dismayed at the decision rendered in Prigg vs Pennsylvania because it upheld their “rights” and punished the northern states for interference.
Of course it also set our national course towards direct conflict because it defined a set of conditions that were intolerable - hence the personal liberty laws that came as a natural consequence. But then you can’t please everybody...
Nope. It just commanded the help of "good citizens" when asked by the marshal or deputy marshal. Good citizens obviously must not have included ardent abolitionists or state officials following personal liberty laws, LOL. Kidding aside, I'm not sure refusing to aid the marshals carried any penalty.
I think the commanding of citizens by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law to help the marshals and deputy marshals in their duties to recover fugitive slaves went against the personal convictions about slavery that many in the North felt. I suspect this command was only honored occasionally by people who felt it their duty to help. Others who objected to being commanded to assist the marshals against their own consciences probably ignored any requests from the marshals for help. And I'm not sure they suffered any convictions in court.
Commanding citizens to aid the federal marshals may have been in essence a dead letter of the law. The law doesn't mention a penalty for refusing to help the marshals. Refusing to help is not the same thing as aiding the fugitive by giving him/her shelter, food, etc., or freeing the slave after he/she was captured by the marshals. It was hard enough to get convictions from Northern juries for those who actually rescued them or fought the marshals, let alone for those who refused to help arrest him/her based on their personal convictions about slavery.
A good book on the subject is "The Slave Catchers, Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850-1860" by Stanley W. Campbell, copyright 1968, 1970. It documents a number of cases.
One notorious case that the Campbell book describes was at Christiana, Pennsylvania on September 11, 1851. Neighboring white Quakers were asked to help by U.S. Deputy Marshal Kline. They refused to help. One of the Quakers then conferred with the blacks gathering to help the fugitives. The blacks immediately started shooting after conferring with the Quaker. The slave owner was killed and his son seriously wounded. Three blacks were killed. The fugitive slaves escaped.
Forty five people including the Quakers who refused to aid the marshals and a large number of blacks were tried for "high treason" in connection with this rescue, not for violating the Fugitive Slave Law. The first to be tried was the Quaker who conferred with the blacks and apparently told them to fight back. He was acquitted before a Pennsylvania jury, and the US government then dropped the charges against the rest of the group. The government might have had more luck if they had charged the defendants with violating the Fugitive Slave Law in rescuing the slaves.
I'll make my following personal comments in blue font about a Quaker ancestor of mine to distinguish it from the current discussion. As a side note, one of my ancestors was a Pennsylvania Quaker. He was a friend of William Penn back in England and in Pennsylvania and named Penn as executor of his will. My ancestor's brother married Cromwell's daughter. My ancestor was elected to the (five member, if memory serves) Provincial Council that governed the Pennsylvania Colony. Penn named him to be a translator for the accused witch in a witch trial. Top that for an unusual ancestor, you guys.
Anyway, one time I tried to find his grave figuring that as a prominent person he would probably have had a notable tombstone or plaque. I went into a ghetto area of Philadelphia to a Quaker graveyard near where he had lived. The graveyard was up a little hill and hidden from the surrounding apartment buildings by trees and was out of view of the street. There were many tombstones. The graves were from the same period when my ancestor lived. I hadn't realized, however, that all of the Quaker tombstones were small, simple, plain, and identical except for the names. His grave was not there, as best I could tell. I kept hearing people in the surrounding buildings and street. In a Jesse Jackson moment I got concerned about my safety in the isolated graveyard, so I hightailed it back to my car. Fortunately, my car was still there.
Back to the Fugitive Slave Law. There were a few convictions of fugitive slave rescuers in this period before the WBTS but also many acquittals or lack of charges. Marshals attempting to capture or return fugitive slaves to their owners were arrested by northern states, but the Federal courts released them.
A key case was that of fugitive Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854. "Highly inflammatory speeches" had been made by people such as Wendell Phillips in Faneuil Hall. Conspirators planned to use the meeting at Faneuil Hall as a cover and to charge the courthouse and rescue Burns at the end of the Faneuil Hall meeting. That they tried to do. Axes were used to cut open the courthouse doors, and one of the guards inside was killed. The rescue attempt failed, however.
During the rest of the trial the square near the courthouse was cleared of several thousand people by troops. Two companies of artillery were summoned by the mayor. Several agitators were arrested for trying to incite violence. The judge said the Fugitive Slave Law was constitutional and the slave was to be returned to his owner. The day that Burns was put on a ship to be returned to Virginia, there were 20,000 people estimated to be in the streets. An entire brigade of Massachusetts militia cleared the street from the courthouse to the wharf. Burns was marched to the wharf in a detachment of 200 troops. There were cannons placed to sweep the square if needed.
A trial of the agitators was held the next year. Wendell Phillips was one of those charged for the riot and attempt to rescue Burns. The defendants were acquitted on a technicality (the power of the federal commissioner to issue a warrant to arrest the fugitive slave had not been described in the charges). The court refused to reseat the Grand Jury to redo the charges. None of the would-be rescuers had even gotten close to the slave and that was thought to be a problem with the indictment.
That slave was the last to be returned from Massachusetts to the state from which he fled. I think the Massachusetts personal liberty law, at least in the form in which I have seen it, dated from 1854. There were no further attempts to retrieve fugitive slaves from New England itself by due process after that. The Massachusetts law held that people who arrested a person alleged to be a fugitive slave who was found not to be a slave could be fined up to $5,000 and sentenced to prison for from one to five years. Plus, it cost more than the slave was worth to go through the process in the courts.
There were hundreds of fugitive slaves living more or less openly in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Frederic Douglas lived and worked there as did escaped South Carolina slave Billy Winters (also called Daniel Fisher to avoid detection). See Link which says in part, "The passage of the fugitive slave law in 1850 forced Winters to spend more than 13 years in New Bedford, Mass., a city that at the time was more friendly to escaped slaves than Connecticut." Also see Another Link that says, "By the 1840s New Bedford had become home to some 300-700 escaped slaves …" There were lots of Quakers in New Bedford.
The Massachusetts personal liberty law, immense crowds opposing the return of fugitive slaves, and flouting of the federal law worked to stop the return of fugitive slaves to their home states.
Point is: few if any Deep South slaves ever escaped to freedom in the Far North or Canada.
I'll go along with relatively few, but your "if any" is over the top. You know better than that. I've cited one South Carolina fugitive slave in a previous post and another one above. Here is a reference to two more from South Carolina who escaped from Charleston on a ship to Boston in May 1860: See Link. One was captured and the other escaped, perhaps all the way to Canada.