 Although I'm not an ancient historian of any stripe, I've enjoyed reading some of the early Greek and Roman historians and philosophers. One writer who stuck out to me in particular was the Roman Stoic Seneca, who happened to be a little fixated on suicide. It was fascinated by the stories of slaves who used suicide to exercise their free will while living in unfree conditions. He told a story of one slave in a letter writing, There was lately in a training school for wild beast gladiators, a German, who was making ready for the morning exhibition. He withdrew in order to relieve himself the only thing which he was allowed to do in secret and without the presence of a guard. While so engaged, he seized the stick of wood tipped with a sponge which was devoted to the vilest of uses, and stuffed it just as it was, down his throat. Next he blocked up his windpipe and choked the breath from his body. The slave was so determined to escape his condition that he not only killed himself, but he did so in a horrible manner by choking himself on a toilet brush because this was the only way he could kill himself without being stopped by his captors. Another of Seneca's stories, which is probably my favorite passage in any of his writings, is about a Spartan slave. Seneca wrote, quote, I shall cite rather the case of a boy. The story of the Spartan lad has been preserved, taken captive while still a stripling. He kept crying in his Doric dialect. I will not be a slave. And he made good his word. For the very first time he was ordered to perform a menial and degrading service, and the command was to fetch a chamber pot. He dashed out his brains against the wall. End quote. These stories may be extreme, but they illustrate something. When people are enslaved, they are at times willing to take incredibly extreme measures in search of freedom. At least freedom of a very morbid sort in these instances. These are people who truly adhere to Patrick Henry's famous line, give me liberty or give me death. And in the antebellum United States, we find slaves who faced similar circumstances, perhaps among the most horrifying cases of a slave resisting recapture after the passage of the fugitive slave law of 1850, is that of Margaret Garner. In January of 1856, she, her husband, and their four children escaped from Kentucky into Ohio. But following the fugitive slave law, a posse of slave catchers hunted them down. This story is one that I'm relating because I know of no other that can illustrate the fear and the dread that people in this situation must have been facing. When she and her family were facing capture, Margaret panicked, unwilling to see her children return to a life of slavery, especially facing the prospect of being sold down the river, as was the euphemism for being sold down the Mississippi River to the much cruel or deep South slave states. She grabbed a kitchen knife and she slit the throat of one of her daughters. She turned to do the same to her other children, but was apprehended before she could do so. And just as she feared, she and her family were recaptured and sold to slave owners in New Orleans. I can't ethically defend her choice to kill her children, even to save them from slavery. Their lives were no more hers to take than they were the slave catchers. But we can also recognize that this is a woman who did not want her children to die. This is a woman who, whether her actions were right or wrong, clearly loved her family. And with the now six-year-old fugitive slave law, she was faced with two options. One was the choice Seneca wrote about, death, for herself and for her loved ones. The other was a lifetime of slavery. That is a decision that I cannot even imagine making for myself or people I care about. In a critical, terrifying moment, Margaret Garner was faced with the knowledge that her daughter was bound to be taken, sold away from her family, placed in the hands of people who would work her, whip her, and rape her with impunity. And this was a lifetime sentence. So this woman decided in that horrible moment that the pain of killing her own daughter was a price worth paying to avoid seeing her sent to that hell. I don't have children myself, but I have nieces and nephews and god-sons. And for the life of me, it is impossible to comprehend how difficult this kind of decision must be. To be a fugitive slave with a family in the 1850s was to face a level of horror that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. This was terrorism. And it was so blatantly evil that many northern whites who had not previously been very concerned with the matter of slavery, who were themselves racists and would continue to be racist, they would nonetheless recognize the incredible evil of this government act and move towards abolitionism. It would also be the turning point for many non-resisters, the pacifist Christian abolitionists following the philosophy of Leo Tolstoy, to abandon their dedication to non-violence. If the compromise of 1850 was meant to mend the division between the north and the south, then the fugitive slave law would be the provision that would entirely undermine that goal. I'm Chris Cowton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast Historical Controversies. In this episode, we will begin our coverage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the tensions it created and the sectional crisis leading up to the Civil War. Article four, section two, clause three of the Constitution, which is known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, states, no person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another shall, and consequence of any law or regulation therein, be it discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. This stipulation needed a law to enforce it. So in 1793, Congress passed the First Fugitive Slave Act, which was signed into law by George Washington. This law allowed for a slave owner to seize any fugitive slave in another state without a warrant and give proof, which was really just the slave owner's testimony that the person seized was the fugitive in question. The law also imposed a $500 fine on anybody harboring fugitive slaves or hindering their arrest. But this law was to be enforced by the states themselves, and many northern states refused to comply. Instead, they passed personal liberty laws. I shouldn't overstate this though, much of the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act by northern states was designed to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks rather than to protect actual fugitive slaves. Pennsylvania, for instance, passed to their personal liberty law in 1820, but amended it in 1826 and 1827 to enforce the capture of fugitive slaves from Maryland. And as can be expected, the Fugitive Slave Act did incentivize kidnappers to seize free blacks and sell them to southern slaveholders under the claim that the kidnapped person was a fugitive slave. So gangs of kidnappers would pop up and make a living by kidnapping free blacks. If you're familiar with the movie 12 Years of Slave, which is, of course, based on the memoirs of Solomon Northrup, he was a victim of such kidnappers under the 1793 law. He was coaxed away from home with the lure of employment by two men who ended up drugging him in a hotel room, and he woke up in chains. He actually had papers on him when he was drugged that testified to his status as a freeman, which the kidnappers themselves encouraged him to get during their act to lure him into a false sense of safety. But of course, the men simply removed and destroyed these papers. This type of behavior was incredibly common, in fact, because the testimony of a black person was not usually even accepted in court. It was incredibly easy for kidnappers to get away with their crime. So some communities started forming self-defense organizations to resist these kidnappers. William Parker, a former slave, wrote of his decision to organize resistors to the kidnappers. He said, quote, the insolent and overbearing conduct of the Southerners went on such errands to Pennsylvania forced me to my course of action. They did not hesitate to break open doors and to enter without ceremony the houses of colored men. And when refused admission, or when a manly and determined spirit was shown, they would present pistols and knock down men and women indiscriminately, end quote. Most white abolitionists at the time were pacifist non-resisters, so they wouldn't actually join the self-defense groups because they opposed even defense violence, but some did help by feeding information, warning them of slave catchers, and encouraging the blacks to flee their potential captors. So the 1793 law was not a benign law. It essentially created a system that made kidnapping profitable and effectively legal, since even though kidnapping free blacks was technically a crime, the rules that courts adhered to essentially prevented blacks from being able to defend themselves. But states with their personal liberty laws could and did refuse to deliberately enforce the law, and sympathetic whites could help fugitive blacks without significant worry about facing the $500 fine. Although it is not a very significant historical episode, there is a case that is interesting enough to talk about, and that's Madsen V. Ashmore for the use of Bryant at all. It's the name of the case. In 1845, Robert Madsen brought five slaves, Jane Bryant and her four children, into Illinois, which was a free state. He worked them for two years, and in 1847 he decided to take them back to Kentucky. So the slaves fled, hiding with Hiram Rutherford and Gideon Ashmore. They were arrested as runaways, but Gideon Ashmore sued for their freedom claiming that since Illinois was a freed state, Jane Bryant and her children were no longer slaves. To defend his claim to his slaves, Robert Madsen hired a 38-year-old lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Now it's interesting that Lincoln even took this case, and historians will probably always debate why he did so. Typically, Lincoln avoided taking fugitive slave cases at all. This case also happened to be taking place 100 miles from where Lincoln lived, and it was to be argued only two weeks before he left to take his seat as a member of the House of Representatives, the term for which started in March of 1847. So it seemed like a very odd decision that he took the case at all, let alone opting to defend the slave owner. Lincoln argued that slave owners could bring their slaves to Illinois as long as the slaves were in transit, so legally they still belonged to Robert Madsen. Thankfully, the court ruled against Lincoln, and Jane Bryant and her children won their freedom. In the context of the events of the late 1840s, this case is of no real significance, but in understanding Abraham Lincoln, this case opens up a slew of questions that historians have trouble answering. On the one hand, it is entirely plausible that Lincoln became increasingly anti-slavery as he got older, which was the case for a lot of Northerners during the 1850s. But as we will see in later episodes, his anti-slavery position never seems to have been a priority of any kind, other than his adherence to preventing the expansion of slavery into the territories. So his defense of a slave owner in 1847 really doesn't seem to be incredibly contradictory with his professed positions on slavery as president. Other historians have generously argued that Lincoln was demonstrating that he valued a fair trial above all else. This to me seems to be the most laughable spin in defense of Lincoln. First off, there doesn't seem to be any reason why a fair trial required him specifically to defend the slave owner. But even if his decision to take the case was somehow to inexplicably demonstrate his devotion to a fair trial, which is ridiculous in itself when you consider the disadvantages blacks faced when defending themselves in court, why should this even still be a defense of him? In what world is it more noble to give a fair trial than to help emancipate a slave? Any claims that Lincoln knew he was going to win the case or gave a weak defense deliberately are nonsense as well. The judge for the case wrote that the case was, quote, argued with unusual ability by the counsel on both sides. Lincoln was a skilled lawyer. And this case appears to showcase his skills as well as any other despite his losing. Some historians speculate that Lincoln simply needed the money, which is plausible enough, but this is still not entirely certain. So the most we can say if we want to be generous to Lincoln is that he was less anti-slavery in his younger days than he was when he was older, but the shift towards anti-slavery was modest at best and these interpretations are questionable in their own right because of other political and military benefits that Lincoln's anti-slavery moves offered later on, which gives us reason to question his motives. But even if we accept this generosity to Lincoln on those matters, it will probably be an eternal mystery why he inexplicably accepted a slave case, which he typically avoided, traveled 100 miles to argue it and did so two weeks before taking office in Congress. But anyway, back to the fugitive slave issue. In 1837, a significant episode would begin culminating in a momentous Supreme Court ruling by 1842. The state of Pennsylvania, which had its 1826 anti-kidnapping personal liberty law in the books, convicted Edward Prigg for the kidnapping of a slave woman and her children to return them to Maryland. This situation was interesting because the woman seized was the person being claimed as a fugitive, which was not the case for many kidnappings. Margaret Morgan moved to Pennsylvania after the death of her owner, John Ashmore. In Maryland, she had technically been enslaved, but had been living as a free woman. But in 1837, the heirs of John Ashmore decided they wanted to reclaim her, so they hired Edward Prigg to hunt her down. So Prigg was convicted in Pennsylvania of kidnapping, but he appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming that the Fugitive Slave Act took precedence over Pennsylvania's 1826 law. His lawyers cited the Fugitive Slave Clause as evidence of the unconstitutionality of Pennsylvania's personal liberty law. The Supreme Court agreed. The federal law trumped the state law and the supremacy clause was cited in the decision. But despite citing with Prigg, the decision written by Joseph Storey also gave States the answer as to how States could legally resist. Quoting from the decision, Storey writes, we hold the act to be clearly constitutional in all its leading provisions, and indeed with the exception of that part which confers authority upon state magistrates to be free from reasonable doubt and difficulty, upon the grounds already stated. As to the authority so conferred upon state magistrates, while a difference of opinion has existed and may exist still on the point in different states, whether state magistrates are bound to act under it, none is entertained by this court. That state magistrates may, if they choose, exercise that authority in less prohibited by state legislation. End quote. The decision goes on to elaborate that states could pass their own legislation and that the police powers completely rested in the hands of the state. So different states might pass legislation that entirely contradicts that of another state. In other words, Prigg v. Pennsylvania asserted that although the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 held supremacy over contradictory state laws, the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act was the responsibility of the federal government, not of the states. Following this decision, a flurry of personal liberty laws were passed by Northern states, nine total between 1842 and 1850. So the Southern slave holders wanted a law with more teeth and this would be the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. I've said previously that the idea that the South was not the state's rights advocate that people see it as, and much of that is evident through the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Other than the ratification of the Constitution itself to replace the Articles of Confederation, the new Fugitive Slave Law gave more power to the central government than any other law up to that point and it was designed to eliminate the prerogatives of Northern states. The new law essentially took a guilty until proven innocent approach to Fugitive Slaves. The burden of proof was on the defendant to prove his or her freedom, but of course they were not allowed to testify in their own defense. The case, furthermore, was to be seen in front of a federally appointed commissioner rather than a state appointee and the most infamous provision is easily the one that paid the commissioner $5 for every defendant ruled free and $10 for every time the commissioner ruled the slave to be the legal property of the claimant. If I can make a Losander Spooner digression here and I'm sure most people listening to this will welcome a Losander Spooner digression, shortly after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed he wrote his defense for Fugitive Slaves. Five years prior to this he had already published the first part of his The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and in this new piece he admits for the sake of argument that we might accept that slavery itself is constitutional and even if this were to be the case the Fugitive Slave Act would still be unconstitutional but the significant aspect of this writing is that it paved the way for his later writing an essay on the trial by a jury which was published in 1852 and pretty much made the case for jury nullification. So Fugitive Slaves were not to be tried by a jury which is the first point upon which Spooner claims that the Fugitive Slave Act is unconstitutional. He believes that the slaves deserve a jury trial and then he believes that the jury should effectively nullify the injustice which is part of his argument in his jury trial essay two years later. So it's interesting how the anti-nullification people love to focus on the contribution by Calhoun who was a vehement defender of slavery but they conveniently ignore not only the fact that states used a nullification to combat the Fugitive Slave Act and Lysander Spooner extrapolated from this the right of the juries to nullify and believed that this should be available for the case of Fugitive Slaves as well. So those of us who might support nullification are actually in pretty good company and nullification by the way took place at the community level as well which I think is interesting enough to mention. Anti-slavery societies held meetings following the passage of the Act and swore oaths to ignore it. In October of 1850 to give one example, the Bart Township in Pennsylvania held a meeting and unanimously resolved to resist the Fugitive Slave Law by refusing to aid in the capture of Fugitive Slaves which they were legally compelled to do according to the new law. They passed a resolution declaring quote, we will harbor, feed and aid the escape of Fugitive Slaves in opposition to the law. But the new law was blatantly rigged in favor of the claimants and the rulings demonstrate the effect of this. Under the 1850 law, 343 slaves were claimed as Fugitive Slaves and only 11 of those were ruled to be legally free. The law also had no statute of limitations which led to some horrifying re-enslavements even by the standards of the time. One man in Maryland claimed to own a woman from Philadelphia who had run away 22 years prior and since then she had six children who were all born in Pennsylvania. Most of the man claimed that all six of those children were legally his as well. Fortunately, these were among the 11 who were actually ruled to be free but most blacks claimed under the Fugitive Slave Law were not so fortunate. There were many Northern politicians who supported the Fugitive Slave Law as a compromise with the South, rice of Lee called Doe Faces but this received a great deal of backlash. One such politician of course was Daniel Webster who gave a speech in support of the law on March 7th, 1850 in response to a speech by Walt Whitman wrote a poem titled Bloody Money two weeks later that was almost certainly a stab at Webster's speech. In the speech he essentially is comparing the Northern supporters of the Fugitive Slave Law to Judas Iscariot. It's not a long poem and I'm going to read the first section of it which doesn't mention anything about the Fugitive Slave Law but you should be able to clearly see the point that Walt Whitman was making. Of olden time when it came to pass that the beautiful God Jesus should finish his work on earth then went Judas and sold the divine youth and took pay for his body. Cursed was the deed even before the sweat of the clutching hand grew dry and darkness frowned upon the cellar of the like of God. Where as though earth lifted her breast to throw him from her and heaven refused him he hung in the air self-slaughtered. The cycles with their long shadows have stalked silently forward since those ancient days many a pouch and wrapping meanwhile it's fee like that paid for the son of Mary and still goes one saying what will ye give me and I will deliver this man unto you and they make the covenant and pay the pieces of silver. So Whitman is effectively calling Daniel Webster a traitor for selling the lives of Fugitive Slaves for 30 pieces of silver. He attacks more directly in another poem he wrote called Wounded in the House of Friends which was published a few months later. This one is less allegorical and it's short enough that I'm going to share the whole thing because I think it gives a really good sense of Northern sentiment among a lot of people at the time. If thou art balked to owe freedom the victory is not to thy manlier foes. From the house of friends comes the death stab. Virginia mother of greatness blush not for being also mother of slaves. You might have borne deeper slaves, dough faces, crawlers, lice of humanity, terrific screamers of freedom who roar and bawl and get hot in the face but were they not incapable of August crime would quench the hopes of ages for a drink. Muckworms creeping flat to the ground, a dollar dear to them than Christ's blessing. All loves all hopes less than the thought of gain in life walking in that as in a shroud men whom the throes of heroes great deeds at which the gods might stand appalled. The shriek of the drowned, the appeal of women, the exulting laugh of untied empires would touch them never in the heart but only in the pocket. Hot headed Carolina, well may you curl your lip with all your bondsmen, bless the destiny which brings you no such breed as this. Arise young north, our elder blood flows in the veins of cowards, the gray haired sneak, the blanched paltrune, the feigned or real shiverer tongues that nursing babes need hardly cry the less for. Are they to be our tokens always? So you can see he's repeating some of the claims implied in Bloody Money. He claims that these dough faces hold a dollar dear to them than Christ's blessing but this time he doesn't disguise his meaning as an allegory. He refers to Virginia and slavery and the north and he essentially calls the politicians of the north cowards for compromising with the south. A paltrune is a coward by the way. So the death stab comes from the house of friends. These sentiments are important to understand because the Fugitive Slave Act actually was a great contributor in turning many in the north toward a more vehement anti-slavery position than they had been previously. The Fugitive Slave Law led to northern resistance that highlighted the growing tensions between the north and the south and I'll be talking about some of the more significant episodes of this in the next two episodes. Because free blacks in the United States had to worry about kidnappers, black communities in some areas, especially border states, started to form resistance groups. Although there weren't many white members of these resistance groups, the local pacifist abolitionists would often feed them information to help them but their resistance to any form of violence precluded their direct involvement. This is actually one of the reasons John Brown is so famous is that he rejected the pacifist philosophy that most abolitionists adhered to and he formed a black resistance group called the League of the Gileadites but he was one of the few white abolitionists willing to be so directly involved. And the black resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law upset the south for more than just the obvious reasons. The south had long been arguing that their slaves were content and submissive and that slavery was good for them and they liked it. This is the paternalistic argument that historian Eugene de Genovese wrote about. So when slaves ran away and fought back, it threw a wrench in this narrative. This so significantly upset the southern claims that southern doctors actually started claiming to have identified, quote, diseases and peculiarities of the Negro race. Among these was a disease given the name dysthesia athiopica, if I'm pronouncing that right, which plantation overseers called rascality. Supposedly this disease caused slaves, quote, to do much mischief which appears as a fintechinal but is mostly owing to stupidness of mind and insensibility of nerves induced by the disease. Thus they break, waste and destroy everything they handle. Abuse horse and cattle, tear, burn or rend their own clothing and paying no attention to the rights of property, still others to replace what they have destroyed. They slight their work, cut up corn, cane, cotton or tobacco and hoeing as if for pure mischief. They raise disturbances with their overseers and fellow servants and seem insensible to pain when subjected to punishment, end quote. The other disease identified by southern doctors was called dreptomania or colloquially referred to as the disease causing Negroes to run away. Dr. Samuel Cartwright who wrote about both of these diseases described it in this way, although it's diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service is well known to our planters and overseers, the cause in most of the cases that induces the Negro to run away from service is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation and much more curable as a general rule. With the advantage of proper medical advice strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state within a stone's throw of the abolition. Before the Negroes run away, unless they are frightened or panic struck, they become sulky and dissatisfied. The cause of this sulkiness and dissatisfaction should be inquired into and removed or they are apt to run away or fall into Negro consumption. When sulky and dissatisfied with cause, the experience of overseers and slave owners was decidedly in favor of whipping them out of it as a preventative measure against absconding or further bad conduct. It was called whipping the devil out of them. End quote. The idea that slaves were content as slaves wasn't just a narrative, that Southern's peddled to the North, it is clear that many of them actually believed this, which the resistance at Christiana in the next episode will offer an example of. So when slaves ran away and resisted, the only explanation that Southerners could give was that they were literally medically diseased, one disease causing slaves to run away and the other causing them to act out. The law also compelled former pacifist abolitionists into rejecting pacifism in favor of armed resistance. Frederick Douglass was one such abolitionist. In October of 1850, he said quote, the only way to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers, end quote. And in a turn of events that must upset anybody who believes in gun control, newspapers were reporting that quote, colored people are arming with quoting here from a Pittsburgh newspaper, revolvers, Bowie knives, and other deadly weapons. So it's easy to see that with the passage of the fugitive slave law, tensions were heating up in a way that the compromise of 1850 was actually hoping to avoid. The law effectively did the opposite of its intended purpose. And with abolitionists increasingly rejecting pacifism, northerners increasingly siding with the abolitionists, even if it was only because the law allowed white conscription essentially to help capture fugitive slaves. And with free blacks arming themselves and forming defense leagues, it seems like it was only a matter of time before real violence would erupt. And that is exactly what would happen in September of 1851 in the town of Cristiana, Pennsylvania, which we will talk about in the next episode. For more content like this, visit mesis.org.