Democrats? The more things change …

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.