In doing research for Maelstrom, the sequel to Tempest at Dawn, I dug into the details behind the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Democrats pushed the bill through with a slim margin and it was signed into law by Millard Fillmore. Reaction in free states was swift and bitter. Protests erupted overnight in almost every northern population center with many openly proclaiming that they would not obey an unconstitutional law. Slaveholders dismissed the protests as “mongrel gatherings.”
Here’s what
the law required.
- Federal government took away state authority to find, return, and try escaped slaves
- Established body of commissioners to hear cases with no right of appeal to legal system
- Commissioners paid $5 when they found for the accused and $10 when they ordered the accused runaway returned to slavery
- U.S. Marshals could conscript citizens against their will to run down fugitive slaves
- Accused fugitive slaves were denied due process and habeas corpus, which overrode many state laws
- Those assisting a fleeing slave faced stiff penalties
- No statute of limitations
Democrats admitted that the law was probably unconstitutional, but they had the Supreme Court in their
pocket with Chief Justice Taney and a majority of the remaining justices from
slaveholding states. Seven years later, Taney would rule in Dred Scott v. John
Sanford that African Americans were not and could not be citizens.
The repercussions
of the Democratic Party shoving the Compromise of 1850 down the throat of the
nation? The nation saw that Whigs were in cahoots with Democrats and formed the
Republican Party. A man with a lucrative law practice decided to get back into
politics. Ten years after the Act, the Republican Party nominated that man as
their candidate for the presidency, and Abraham Lincoln became the sixteenth
president of the United States. At his Cooper Union Address, Lincoln accused Democrats
of promising “to destroy the government, unless you are allowed to construe and
enforce the constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you
and us. You will rule or ruin.”
The
Democratic Party made good on it’s promise.
