The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history

by Wilbur Henry Siebert

The inefficiency of the first Fugitive Slave Act was early recognized, and the period during which it was in existence witnessed many attempts at amendment. It is possible that the failure of Washington to recover his slave in 1796 furnished the occasion for the first of these.[868] A motion was made, December 29, 1796, looking toward the alteration of the law.[869] Apparently nothing was done at this time, and the matter lapsed until 1801, when it came up in January and again in December of that year.[870] In the month last named a committee was appointed in the House, which reported a bill that gave rise to considerable debate. This bill provided that employing a fugitive as well as harboring one should be punishable; and that those furnishing employment to negroes must require them to show official certificates and must publish descriptions of them. It is reported that Southern members "considered it a great injury to the owners of that species of property, that runaways were employed in the Middle and Northern states, and even assisted in procuring a living. They stated that, when slaves ran away and were not recovered, it excited discontent among the rest. When they were caught and brought home, they informed their comrades how well they were received and assisted, which excited a disposition in others to attempt escaping, and obliged their masters to use greater severity than they otherwise would. It was, they said, even on the score of humanity, good policy in those opposed to slavery to agree to this law."[871] Northern members did not accept this view of the fugitive slave question, and when the proposed bill was put to vote January 18, 1802, it failed of passage.[872] The division on the measure took place on sectional grounds, all the Northern members but five voting against it, all the Southern members but two for it.[873]

For the next fifteen years Congress appears to have given no consideration to the propriety of amending the law of 1793. Its attention was mainly occupied by the abolition of the slave-trade, the agitation preliminary to the War of 1812, and the events of that War.[874] At length, in 1817, a Senate committee reported a bill to revise the law, but it was never brought up for consideration. In the same year a bill was drafted and presented to the House, on account of the need of a remedy for the increased insecurity of slave property in the border slave states. Pindall, of Virginia, seems to have been its originator; at any rate he was the chairman of the committee that reported the proposition. The interest in the discussion that resulted was increased, doubtless, by two petitions, one from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, asking for a milder law than that in existence, the other from the Baltimore Quakers, seeking some security for free negroes against kidnapping.

The House bill as presented in 1817 secured to the claimant of a runaway the right to prove his title before the courts of his own state, and thus to reclaim his human property through requisition upon the governor of the state in which it had taken refuge; it was further provided that the writ of habeas corpus was to have no force as against the provisions of the proposed act. The objections made to the measure are worth noting. Mr. Holmes, of Massachusetts, disapproved of the effort to dispense with the writ of habeas corpus, stating that such action would remove a safeguard from the liberty of free colored people. Mr. Mason, of the same state, declared against trial by jury, which somebody had proposed, insisting that "juries in Massachusetts would in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred decide in favor of fugitives, and he did not wish his town (Boston) infected with the runaways of the South." Mr. Sergeant, of Pennsylvania, sought to amend the bill by making the judges of the state in which the arrest occurred the tribunal to decide the fact of slavery. And, last of all, Mr. Whitman, of Massachusetts, opposed the provision making it a penal offence for a state officer to decline to execute the act; a point, it should be remarked, that came into prominence in the famous case of Prigg vs. Pennsylvania in 1842. Notwithstanding these efforts to modify the bill, it was carried without change, January 30, 1818, by a vote of 84 to 69. In the Senate the bill was not passed without alteration. After a vote to limit the act to four years, the upper House made amendments requiring some proofs of the debt of service claimed other than the affidavit of the claimant, and then passed the act on March 12. The lower House did not find the modified bill to its liking, and therefore declined to consider it further.[875]

This failure to secure a new general fugitive slave act by no means prevented those interested from renewing their endeavors in that direction. Before the close of the year the House was prompted to bestir itself again by a resolution of the Maryland legislature asking protection against citizens of Pennsylvania who were charged with harboring and protecting fugitive slaves.[876] That the allegation was well founded cannot be doubted. Evidence has already been adduced to show that numerous branches of the Underground Railroad had begun to develop in southeastern Pennsylvania as early at least as the year 1800.[877] A month after the presentation of the Maryland resolution a committee of the House was appointed. This committee reported a bill without delay, but again nothing was accomplished. The framing of the Missouri Compromise at the next session of Congress, in 1820, gave opportunity for the incorporation of a fugitive recovery clause, to enable Southern settlers in Missouri and other slave states to recapture their absconding slaves from the free territory north of the new state.[878] The fugitive clause in the Ordinance of 1787 had insured the same right for slave-owners taking land along the western frontier of Illinois.

But of what utility were such provisions unless they could be carried into effect? Immediately after the Missouri Compromise became a law, propositions for new fugitive slave acts were again offered in both the House and the Senate.[879] A later attempt was made in the winter of 1821-1822, when another resolution of the Maryland legislature similar to the one mentioned above was presented. These efforts, like the earlier ones, failed to secure the desired legislation.[880]

The last petition of Maryland to Congress for the redress of her grievance due to the underground operations of anti-slavery Pennsylvanians was made December 17, 1821. The month of January of the same year had witnessed the presentation in Congress of a resolution from the general assembly of Kentucky, protesting against Canada's admission of fugitives to her domain, and requesting negotiation with Great Britain on the subject. In 1826, during the administration of John Quincy Adams, negotiations were at length opened. Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, instructed Mr. Gallatin, the American Minister at the Court of St. James, to propose an agreement between the two countries providing for "mutual surrender of all persons held to service or labor, under the laws of either party, who escape into the territory of the other." His purpose in urging such a stipulation was, he declared, "to provide for a growing evil which has produced some, and if it be not shortly checked, is likely to produce much more irritation." He also stated that Virginia and Kentucky were particularly anxious that an understanding should be reached.

In February, 1827, Mr. Clay again communicated with Mr. Gallatin on the subject, being led to do so by another appeal made to the general government by the legislature of Kentucky. At this time he mentioned the fact that a provision for the restoration of fugitive slaves had been inserted in the treaty recently concluded with the United Mexican States, a treaty, it should be added, that failed of confirmation by the Mexican Senate. About five months later the American Minister sent word to the Secretary of State that the English authorities had decided that "It was utterly impossible for them to agree to a stipulation for the surrender of fugitive slaves," and this decision was reaffirmed in September, 1827.

The positive terms in which this conclusion was announced by the representative of the British government might have been accepted as final at this time had not further consideration of the question been demanded by the House of Representatives. On May 10, 1828, that body adopted a resolution "requesting the President to open a negotiation with the British government in the view to obtain an arrangement whereby fugitive slaves, who have taken refuge in the Canadian provinces of that government, may be surrendered by the functionaries thereof to their masters, upon their making satisfactory proof of their ownership of said slaves." This resolution was promptly transmitted to Mr. Barbour, the new Minister, with the explanation before made to Gallatin, that the evil at which it was directed was a growing one, well calculated to disturb "the good neighborhood" that the United States desired to maintain with the adjacent British provinces. But as in the case of the former attempts to secure the extradition of the refugee settlers in Canada, so also in this, the advances of the American government were met by the persistent refusal of Great Britain to make a satisfactory answer.[881]

The agitation in Congress for a more effective fugitive slave law, and the diplomatic negotiations for the recovery of runaways from Canadian soil, which have been recounted in the preceding pages, must be regarded as furnishing evidence of the existence in many localities in the free states of a strong practical anti-slavery sentiment. This evidence is reënforced by the facts presented in the earlier chapters of this volume. The escape of slaves from their masters into the free states and their simple but impressive appeals for liberty were phenomena witnessed again and again by many Northern people during the opening as well as the later decades of the nineteenth century; and deepened the conviction in their minds that slavery was wrong. Thus for years the runaway slave was a missionary in the cause of freedom, especially in the rapidly settling Western states. His heroic pilgrimage, undertaken under the greatest difficulties, was calculated to excite active interest in his behalf. Persons living along the border of the slave states, whose sympathies were stirred to action by their personal knowledge of the hardships of slavery, became the promoters of lines of Underground Railroad, sending or taking fugitives northward to friends they could trust. It was not an infrequent occurrence that intimate neighbors were called in to hear the thrilling tales of escape related in the picturesque and fervid language of negroes that valued liberty more than life. The writer, who has heard some of these stories from the lips of surviving refugees in Canada, can well understand the effect they must have produced upon the minds of the spectators. Many children got their lasting impression of slavery from the things they saw and heard in homes that were stations on the Underground Road. John Brown was reared in such a home. His father, Owen Brown, was among the earliest settlers of the Western Reserve in Ohio that are known to have harbored fugitives, and the son followed the father's example in keeping open house for runaway slaves.[882] As early as 1815 many blacks began to find their way across the Reserve,[883] and it is stated that even before this year more than a thousand fugitives had been assisted on their way to Canada by a few anti-slavery people of Brown County in southwestern Ohio.[884] It is probable that numerous escapes were also being made thus early through other settled regions. The cause for this early exodus is not far to seek. The increase of the domestic slave-trade from the northern belt of slaveholding states to the extreme South, due to the profitableness of cotton-raising, and stimulated by the prohibition of the foreign slave-trade in 1807, aroused slaves to flight in order to avoid being sold to unknown masters in remote regions. The slight knowledge they needed to guide them in a northerly course was easily obtainable through the rumors about Canada everywhere current during the War of 1812.[885] The noticeable political effects of the straggling migration that began under these circumstances is seen in the renewed agitation by Southern members of Congress during the years 1817 to 1822 for a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law, and the negotiations with England several years later looking toward the restoration to the South of runaways who had found freedom and security on Canadian soil.