I have to imagine that I'm a Northerner who refuses to obey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.How should I write

Question

write a diary entry that plans a route of escape that I could take from my home if a runaway slave were to approach me for help?

I have no clue how to do this.

Answer 1

Use a fictitious underground group who are abolitionists. The route would depend on where you live. Try to get the slaves to Canada. Think of whom you could hide them with and where along the way. Don't have them go to largely populated areas.

Answer 2

Massachusetts outlawed slavery in 1755 but enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, which it outlawed in 1843. The United States outlawed the importation of any new slaves in 1844, but the remaining slaves remained in slavery.

If you refused to obey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, you might yourself also become a fugitive, so you would want to pack two of everything.

Answer 3

The first thing to do is start with a map. Decide where you live and then figure out what is between that place and Canada.

The University of Alabama has an amazing website with historical maps from all over the USA. Pick a state and find a map from the 1840s or 1850s.
http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/us_states/states.html

Good luck!

Answer 4

By all means, help to get the person into Canada and help to try to get employment.

A lot of abolitionists didn't bother with that.

Answer 5

The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slaveholding interests and Northern Free-Soilers.

A significant source of conflict between Southern slave states and Northern free states was the lack of assistance given by Northerners to Southern slave-owners and their agents, who were seeking to recapture escaped slaves. Many Southerners viewed this as support for abolitionism, and resented Northern officials' refusal to respect Southern states' rights. In contrast, most Northern states had abolished slavery within their borders, and many Northern officials did not want their local institutions to be used to support the enforcement of Southern states' slavery laws. They viewed efforts to compel such assistance as an infringement of Northern states' rights.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was a Federal law which enforced a section of the United States Constitution that required the return of runaway slaves. It sought to force the authorities in free states to return fugitive slaves to their masters. In practice, however, the law was rarely enforced. Some Northern states passed "personal liberty laws", mandating a jury trial before alleged fugitive slaves could be moved. Otherwise, they feared free blacks (who could vote in ten of the thirteen states at the time of the adoption of the Constitution) could be kidnapped into slavery. Other states forbade the use of local jails or the assistance of state officials in the arrest or return of such fugitives. In some cases, juries simply refused to convict individuals who had been indicted under the Federal law. Moreover, locals in some areas actively fought attempts to seize fugitives and return them to the South. The Missouri State Supreme Court routinely held that transportation of slaves into free states automatically made them free. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), that states did not have to proffer aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves, greatly weakening the law of 1793.


New law
In the response to the weakening of the original fugitive slave act, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made any Federal marshal or other official who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave liable to a fine of $1,000. Law-enforcement officials everywhere now had a duty 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. In addition, any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to six months' imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Officers who captured a fugitive slave were entitled to a fee for their work.


Effects
In fact the Fugitive Slave Law brought the issue home to anti-slavery citizens in the North, since it made them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery. Even moderate abolitionists were now faced with the immediate choice of defying what they believed an unjust law or breaking with their own consciences and beliefs. The case of Anthony Burns fell under this statute.

Many Methodists were highly active in the abolition movement, though the Methodist Episcopal Church was officially reluctant to touch the issue because it did not want to fan the flames of inter-sectional hatreds after the Southern wing split off in 1844. Two splinter groups of Methodism, the Wesleyan Church in 1843 and the Free Methodists in 1860, along with many like-minded Quakers, maintained some of the "stations" of the Underground Railroad. Most of the stations were maintained by African Americans.

The Fugitive Slave Act brought a defiant response from abolitionists. Reverend Luther Lee, pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Syracuse, New York wrote in 1855:

I never would obey it. I had assisted thirty slaves to escape to Canada during the last month. If the authorities wanted any thing of me my residence was at 39 Onondaga Street. I would admit that and they could take me and lock me up in the Penitentiary on the hill; but if they did such a foolish thing as that I had friends enough on Onondaga County to level it to the ground before the next morning.

Other opponents such as African American leader Harriet Tubman simply treated the law as just another complication in their activities. The most important reaction was making the neighboring country of Canada the main destination of choice for runaway slaves. Only a few hundred runaways made it to Canada in the 1850s.

With the outbreak of the American Civil War, General Benjamin Butler justified refusing to return runaway slaves in accordance to this law because the Union and the Confederacy were at war, the slaves could be confiscated and set free as contraband of war.The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842 (16 Peters 539)—that state authorities could not be forced to act in fugitive slave cases, but that national authorities must carry out the national law—was followed by legislation in Massachusetts (1843), Vermont (1843), Pennsylvania (1847) and Rhode Island (1848), forbidding state officials from aiding in enforcing the law and refusing the use of state jails for fugitive slaves. one slave cried out, "Ahlakamah teh du bois" This meant, "let us be free"


[edit] 1850 statute
Main article: Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
The demand from the South for more effective Federal legislation was voiced in the second fugitive slave law, drafted by Senator J. M. Mason of Virginia, and enacted on September 18, 1850, as a part of the Compromise of 1850. Special commissioners were to have concurrent jurisdiction with the U.S. circuit and district courts and the inferior courts of territories in enforcing the law; fugitives could not testify in their own behalf; no trial by jury was provided.

Penalties were imposed upon marshals who refused to enforce the law or from whom a fugitive should escape, and upon individuals who aided Negroes to escape; the marshal might raise a posse comitatus; a fee of $10 was paid to the commissioner when his decision favored the claimant and only $5 when it favored the fugitive; and both the fact of the escape and the identity of the fugitive were to be determined on purely ex parte testimony. The severity of this measure led to gross abuses and defeated its purpose; the number of abolitionists increased, the operations of the Underground Railroad became more efficient, and new Personal Liberty Laws were enacted in Vermont (1850), Connecticut (1854), Rhode Island (1854), Massachusetts (1855), Michigan (1855), Maine (1855 and 1857), Kansas (1858) and Wisconsin (1858). These Personal Liberty Laws forbade justices and judges to take cognizance of claims, extended the Habeas corpus act and the privilege of jury trial to fugitives, and punished false testimony severely. In 1859, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin went so far as to declare the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional.

These state laws were one of the grievances officially referred to by South Carolina as justifying its secession from the Union. Attempts to carry into effect the law of 1850 aroused much bitterness. The arrests of Sims and of Shadrach in Boston in 1851; of Jerry M. Henry, in Syracuse, New York, in the same year; of Anthony Burns in 1854, in Boston; and of the two Garner families in 1856, in Cincinnati, with other cases arising under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, probably had as much to do with bringing on the Civil War as did the controversy over slavery in the Territories.


[edit] Civil War-era legal status of fugitive slaves
See also: Emancipation Proclamation
With the beginning of the Civil War, the legal status of the slave was changed by his masters being in arms. General B. F. Butler, in May 1861, declared ***** slaves contraband of war. A confiscation bill was passed in August 1861 discharging from his service or labor any slave employed in aiding or promoting any insurrection against the government of the United States. By an act of July 17, 1862, any slave of a disloyal master who was in territory occupied by Northern troops was declared ipso facto free. But for some time the Fugitive Slave Law was considered still to hold in the case of fugitives from masters in the border states who were loyal to the Union government, and it was not until the June 28, 1864, that the Act of 1850 was repealed.