1833-1865
THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT:
The Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
In his book Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American History 1513-2008, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes that the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 was one of the most important events in the development of the abolitionist movement.
The new organization built on the earlier experiences of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society; the American Convention of Abolition Societies, which first met more than 40 years earlier; and other groups in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
Led by Boston’s William Lloyd Garrison and New York’s Arthur and Lewis Tappan, northern abolitionists met in Philadelphia in December 1833 to unite the movement’s disparate elements around the idea of immediate emancipation. White liberal Christians and orthodox Presbyterians met in the Quaker city with Black abolitionists James McCrummell, Rober Purvis, James Forten, and James G. Barbadoes. Together they signaled the society’s “Declaration of Sentiments” in a dramatic ceremony that mimicked the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Underground Railroad was a network of people, Black and white, who offered shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.
The earliest mention of the Underground Railroad came in 1831, when enslaved man Tice Davids escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and his owner blamed an “underground railroad” for helping Davids to freedom. In 1839, a Washington newspaper reported that an escaped enslaved man named Jim had revealed, under torture, his plan to go north following an “underground railroad to Boston.”
In the very picture of contrast, the movement to abolish slavery developed even as those who believed in the institution were passing federal laws allowing the capture and return of runaway enslaved people within the United States.
The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed the capture and return of runaway enslaved people within the territory of the United States. Enacted by Congress in 1793, the first Fugitive Slave Act authorized local governments to seize and return escapees to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided in their flight.
Widespread resistance to the 1793 law led Southern politicians to press Congress to revise the act, to add more provisions regarding runaways and to levy even harsher punishments for interfering in their capture. Congress then passed the revised Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. This new law was part of Henry Clay’s famed Compromise of 1850—a group of bills that helped quiet early calls for Southern secession; the new law forcibly compelled citizens to assist in the capture of runaways, denied enslaved people the right to a jury trial, and increased the penalty for interfering with the rendition process to $1,000 and six months in jail.
The Fugitive Slave Acts were among the most controversial laws of the early 19th century.
Sources
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project, 1st ed. (New York: The New York Times Company, 2021), 108.
History.com – Underground Railroad
History.com – Fugitive Slave Acts
Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 67-68.