FUGITIVE SLAVES AND THE FIGHT FOR AMERICA’S SOUL
Counting the cost of a nation’s moral contradictions
Many an adolescent has pointed out the discrepancy between a nation proclaiming in its founding document that “all men are created equal” and that same nation countenancing human slavery. Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 “House Divided” speech most eloquently captured this incompatibility, but Americans on both sides of the divide had been well aware of this since the earliest days of the republic.
Nowhere did this incongruity manifest itself so starkly as with the fugitive slave issue. In his essential new book “The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul From the Revolution to the Civil War,” distinguished scholar Andrew Delbanco provides a comprehensive overview of how the legal, moral and ontological questions posed by the presence of enslaved people in free territory unsettled the tenuous compromises (such as the threefifths clause and the principle of equal representation in the Senate for all states) that started with the design of the Constitution and ended only with the Emancipation Proclamation.
The problem wasn’t just the moral and economic clash. Logic itself rejected this marriage, as became clear not only in the loud political battle over slavery but also particularly in the application of the law. Was a slave a human being or property? An enslaved woman was “a person when she transgressed but … property when she was transgressed against,” as Mr. Delbanco elegantly phrases it. When one state did not recognize slavery as legitimate, could or should it uphold the legal rights of citizens of a different region that countenanced slavery? And what role should the federal government play in guaranteeing the property rights of Southerners and the human rights of enslaved people who came North?
The infant nation didn’t even have a Constitution when the first fugitive slave issue brought out sectional conflict. A slaveholder living in what became Washington County in Pennsylvania (but what he likely thought had been northwest Virginia when he moved there — the borders between the Colonies were disputed) shuttled his slave John Davis between the two states, ignoring Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Emancipation Act, which required him to register all of his slaves.
In 1788, a group of abolitionists crossed into Virginia to bring John Davis back north to freedom, but bounty hunters soon kidnapped him and returned him to slavery. A Pennsylvania grand jury indicted the bounty hunters, but Virginia refused to return them for trial, as it recognized no crime in reinstating a slaveholder’s property. The governor of Pennsylvania turned to President George Washington for guidance, and Washington kicked the issue to Congress, who ratified the new republic’s first fugitive slave law in 1793.
But no law could solve the contradictions of a slave system and a free system coexisting in the same country. The evolving series of fugitive slave laws offended Northerners, who saw them as extending slavery into free territory by obliging state and local officials to recognize slave owners’ claims. They also frustrated Southerners, as
“THE WAR BEFORE THE WAR: FUGITIVE SLAVES AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AMERICA’S SOUL FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE CIVIL WAR” By Andrew Delbanco Penguin Press $30
Northern officials were not required to find runaway slaves and reinstate them to their owners.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 changed this. Local and state law enforcement officials now had to recognize any claimant’s testimony of ownership and work to find his slaves. Providing aid or shelter to an escaped slave was now a crime. And the identified fugitive was not even allowed to testify on his or her own behalf, even to dispute an erroneous identification. Northerners saw this “compromise” as the final capitulation to slave power.
The story of the “road to the Civil War” is a familiar one, but in this masterful book, Mr. Delbanco foregrounds what he sees as the pivotal role of the fugitive slave issue in accelerating and intensifying the sectional conflict that culminated in secession and war. Having two contradictory systems in one nation had been a problem from the beginning, but the “Compromise of 1850” that included this fugitive slave law “discredited the very idea of compromise until the word itself became toxic.” And once the nation reached that point, the only result could be a divorce or armed conflict — or both.