The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Joined
Oct 3, 2005
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 strengthened the previous Act of 1793. The earlier act didn't work very well, in the sense of getting people back into slavery. George Washington's prolonged, but fruitless pursuit of one of his escaped women, Oney Judge, demonstrates its toothless nature.

But the beefed up 1850 law wasn't all that successful either. 330 people were forced back into slavery by 1860. That's 330 too many, of course, but only a fraction of the number of escapees per year. This doesn't count the number arrested, but whom escaped, or the few found not to actually be fugitives.

Antebellum America was definitely not a society that tended to keep close tabs on people generally, outside the slave states, of course. Officers of the law were local and had little reason to be interested in solving slavery's escape problem. But because the incidents were so individualized, so dramatic, it galvanized interest. I'll share some of these accounts.







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