Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 - Effect On People

Effect On People

This law put fugitive slaves at risk for recapture all their lives, but some slaveowners did not think it strong enough. It also classified children born to fugitive slave mothers as slaves and the property of the mother's master, for all their lives.

Oney Judge (sometimes spelled Ona) was one of Martha Washington's slaves and chambermaids; she served the Washingtons in Virginia and at the President's House in Philadelphia when Washington was President; the city was the temporary capital from 1790-1800. She escaped on May 21, 1796. George Washington made two attempts to seize her shortly afterwards, even enlisting the help of the Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr in a letter written on September 1, 1796. Later his nephew visited her and asked that she return. Neither attempt was successful. Washington acted discreetly to avoid controversy in Philadelphia, which had a strong Quaker abolitionist community.

Having settled in New Hampshire, married and had a child, in the 1840s Oney Judge was interviewed by Rev. Benjamin Chase. He published the account in a "Letter to the editor" in the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, on January 1, 1847. He described that under the law, she and her child were still at risk for being seized as a fugitive slave at any time, even 50 years after her escape, if Martha Washington's descendants decided to make a legal claim. Legally, they had inherited the pair as part of their mother's estate.

"This woman is yet a slave. If Washington could have got her and her child, they were constitutionally his; and if Mrs. Washington's heirs were now to claim her, and take her before Judge Woodbury, and prove their title, he would be bound, upon his oath, to deliver her up to them."

Many northern states enacted legislation to protect free black Americans (who could otherwise be abducted, then brought before court without the ability to produce a defense, and subsequently lawfully enslaved) as well as runaway slaves. These laws came to be known as “personal liberty laws” and required slave owners and fugitive hunters to produce evidence that their captures were truly fugitive slaves, “just as southern states demanded the right to retrieve runaway slaves, northern states demanded the right to protect their free black residents from being kidnapped and sold into servitude in the south,” (Finkelman 399). One controversy was the case of Prigg vs. Pennsylvania. Edward Prigg, a citizen of Maryland, was indicted by a Pennsylvania court for attempting to kidnap a black woman in York County to return her to Maryland as a fugitive slave. He was tried and convicted by a local court in Pennsylvania, but the case was eventually appealed to the Supreme Court. Prigg had originally shown his legal warrant to the Pennsylvania court, but it had been unlawfully ignored, demonstrating that the Fugitive Slave Act really depended on state judges, not the national law.

The slave-catching industry expanded as a result of this law, with men who were effectively bounty hunters capturing and returning many slaves to their legal owners. In addition, because of the high demand for slaves in the Deep South and hunt for fugitives, free blacks were at risk of being kidnapped and sold into slavery, even if they had their "free" papers. There were numerous instances in which people who were legally free and had never been slaves were captured and brought south to be sold into slavery. The historian Carol Wilson documented 300 such cases in Freedom at Risk (1994) and estimated there were likely thousands more.

A prominent example was Solomon Northup, born free around 1808 to Mintus Northup and his wife, in Essex County, New York state. (Note: In his memoir, Solomon did not name his mother, but described her as of mixed race and a quadroon.) In 1841 Northup was tricked into going to Washington, DC, where slavery was legal. He was drugged, kidnapped and sold into slavery, and held as a slave in Louisiana for 12 years. One of the very few to regain freedom under such circumstances, he later sued the slave traders involved in Washington, DC. Its law prohibited Northrup from testifying against the white men because he was black, and he lost the case. The New York Times published an article on this trial on January 20, 1853. Northup published his memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (1853), a slave narrative of plantation life on the Red River in Louisiana, and a description of the slave trade in Washington, DC. It is available online to read at Project Gutenberg or Google books.