Did you know? The passage of fugitive slave laws resulted in the illegal capture of many free blacks and their sale into slavery. One famous case involved Solomon Northup, a free-born black musician who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. in 1841. Northup spent 12 years in Louisiana before regaining his freedom in 1853. Fugitive slaves had a huge influence on the development of the anti-slavery movement. First, a number of refugees have become very prominent abolitionist leaders and speakers. The most famous is Frederick Douglass, who fled Maryland. But there were several others, [including] Henry Highland Garnet. They were living embodiments of the reality of slavery.
When Douglass stood up and talked about his life as a slave, it was hard to dismiss him as a good Northern Liberal who really did not understand the situation in the South, as many Southerners would claim. These are people who experienced slavery firsthand. In the late 1850s, an unsuccessful campaign was launched by several Southern states to resume the international slave trade in order to replenish their slave populations, but this met with strong resistance. [6] However, there was a great natural growth of the slave population in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while some of the illegal smuggling of African slaves via Spanish Cuba continued. The Fugitive Slave Acts were acts of Congress passed in 1793 and 1850 that allowed for the seizure and return of fugitive slaves fleeing from one state to another (Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.). The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850, required the U.S. government to actively intervene to help slave owners regain control of their slaves (Ohio History Connection, n.d.). This law stipulated that runaway slaves could not testify on their own behalf, nor could they be tried by a jury (Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.). This was "justified" by legislators` claims that African Americans could not be citizens of the United States and therefore did not receive protection (Ohio History Connection, n.d.). In no trial or hearing under this Act shall the testimony of an alleged refugee be admitted into evidence; and the certificates contained in this Section and in the First [Fourth] Section shall be exhaustive of the right of the person or persons for whom the allowance has been granted to remove that refugee to the State or territory from which he has fled and shall prevent any harassment of such person or persons by judicial proceedings. Judge, judge or any other person, it doesn`t matter.