About four years before this historic decision was declared, that is to say, in December, 1838, John Calhoun, of Kentucky, sought to introduce a resolution in the House looking towards an enactment making it unlawful for any person to aid fugitive slaves in escaping from their owners, and another making it unlawful for any person in the non-slaveholding states to entice slaves from their owners, the prosecution of offenders against these proposed laws to take place in the courts of the United States. Objections were made to the introduction of these resolutions, and Mr. Calhoun was prevented from getting a reference of the matter to the Committee on the Judiciary by a vote of 107 to 89.[907] When the Prigg decision came, its political significance was quickly shown in the passage of laws by various Northern states forbidding their officers from performing the duties imposed by the act of 1793. From 1842 to 1850, Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island passed such laws, and Connecticut, while repealing an earlier law on her statute books as being at the time unconstitutional, retained the portion of it that restrained state officers from assisting in the execution of the act.
In the meantime the Southern leaders did not fail to note the progress of anti-slavery sentiment north of Mason and Dixon's line. This was not less manifest in the formation of the Liberty party in the early years of the decade 1840-1850, than in the legislative and other opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. Indeed, so marked an impression had been made upon the minds and sympathies of anti-slavery men by the brave and successful flight of slaves, that a Liberty convention at Peterboro, New York, in January, 1842, issued an address to slaves, declaring that slavery was to be "tortured even unto death," advising them to seek liberty by flight, and assuring them that the abolitionist knew no more grateful employment than that of helping escaping slaves to Canada. In August of the following year the national convention of the new party, comprising nearly a thousand delegates from all the free states except New Hampshire, made the disavowal of the fugitive recovery clause of the Constitution a part of the party platform, voting by a decisive majority "to regard and treat the third clause of the Constitution, whenever applied to the case of a fugitive slave, as utterly null and void; and consequently as forming no part of the Constitution of the United States whenever we are called upon or sworn to support it."[908] About the time of the announcement of this principle, Mr. Garrison issued in behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society an address to the bondmen of the South, in which they were promised deliverance from their chains, and were encouraged to run away from their masters. "If you come to us, and are hungry," ran the address, "we will feed you; if thirsty, we will give you drink; if naked, we will clothe you; if sick, we will minister to your necessities; if in prison, we will visit you; if you need a hiding-place from the face of the pursuer, we will provide one that even bloodhounds will not scent out."[909]
Such open attacks upon the property rights of planters and slave-traders must have been extremely aggravating to Southerners, and, of course, contributed to bring the question of a more effective Fugitive Slave Law again under the consideration of Congress, notwithstanding the fact that a large share of that body's attention was occupied during the period from 1844 to 1848 with matters connected with the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War and the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute. In 1847 the legislature of Kentucky presented a petition to Congress urging the importance of new laws so framed as to enable the citizens of slaveholding states to reclaim their negroes when they had absconded into the free states. This resulted in a bill reported in the Senate, but the bill never got beyond its second reading. Two years later an attempt was made in the House to secure legislation for the same object, but the committee to whom the matter was referred seems never to have reported.
At intervals more or less frequent, during a period of more than fifty years, the South had been demanding of Congress adequate protection for its human property against the depredations of those Northerners who rejoiced in the work of secret emancipation. The efforts of the slaveholding section for a stricter fugitive recovery law had uniformly failed down to 1850, and it seems altogether likely that the success won in the year named would not have been realized,[910] if a bill intended to meet the needs of slave-owners had not been made an essential part of the great scheme of compromise for the adjustment of the differences threatening the perpetuity of the Union at the time.[911] The measure that was finally adopted, as a part of the programme of compromise, was one introduced into the Senate by Mr. Mason, of Virginia, in the early part of the first session of the Thirty-first Congress. It was aimed, said its author, at evils "more deeply seated and widely extended than those" his colleague recognized. "The state from whence I came," continued Mr. Mason, "and the states of Kentucky and Maryland, being those states of the Union that border on the free states, have had ample experience, not only of the difficulties, but of the actual impossibility of reclaiming a fugitive when he once gets within the boundaries of a non-slaveholding state."[912] Henry Clay, the author of the Compromise, whose disposition had been to lean to the Northern rather than to the Southern side of the general controversy, expressed the irritation of his own state, Kentucky, when he said concerning the question of fugitive slaves: "Upon this subject I do think that we have just and serious cause of complaint against the free States. I think they have failed in fulfilling a great obligation, and the failure is precisely upon one of those subjects which in its nature is most irritating and inflammatory to those who live in slave States.... It is our duty to make the law more effective; and I shall go with the senator from the South who goes furthest in making penal laws and imposing the heaviest sanctions for the recovery of fugitive slaves and the restoration of them to their owners."[913] Delaware and Missouri had grievances similar to those of Kentucky and other border states. The region constituted by these states suffered heavy losses through the operations of the Underground Railroad.[914]
That the cotton states also lost considerable property every year by the escape of slaves to the North appears from a statement of Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi: "Negroes do escape from Mississippi frequently," he said, "and the boats constantly passing by our long line of river frontier furnish great facility to get into Ohio; and when they do escape it is with great difficulty that they are recovered; indeed, it seldom occurs that they are restored. We, though less than the border states, are seriously concerned in this question.... Those who, like myself, live on that great highway of the West—the Mississippi River—and are most exposed, have a present and increasing interest in the matter. We desire laws that shall be effective, and at the same time within the constitutional power of Congress; such as shall be adequate, and be secured by penalties the most stringent which can be imposed."[915] Calhoun admitted that discontent was universal in the South, and declared that conciliation could only come when the North consented to meet certain conditions, one of which was the restoration of fugitive slaves.
Many of the speeches contained suggestions and prophecies of disunion. One of these, made by Pratt, of Maryland, called the attention of the Senate to a recent address delivered by Mr. Seward, of New York, before an assembly of Ohioans, in which he urged them to "extend a cordial welcome to the fugitive who lays his weary limbs at your door, and defend him as you would your household gods."[916] Another made by Yulee, of Florida, informed the Senate of a convention then sitting at Cazenovia, New York, attended by more than thirty runaway slaves, and held for the purpose of devising ways and means of escape for blacks. The language of the address to slaves issued by the convention was not calculated to reassure slave-owners. In part it ran: "Including our children, we number here in Canada 20,000 souls. The population in the free States are, with few exceptions, the fugitive slave's friends.
"We are poor. We can do little more for your deliverance than pray to God for it. We will furnish you with pocket compasses, and in the dark nights you can run away. We cannot furnish you with weapons; some of us are not inclined to carry arms; but if you can get them, take them, and, before you go back into bondage, use them, if you are obliged to take life. The slaveholders would not hesitate to kill you, rather than not take you back into bondage.
"Numerous as the escapes from slavery are, they would still be more so, were it not for the master's protection of the rights of property. You even hesitate to take the slowest of his horses; but we say take the fastest. Pack up provisions and clothes; and either get a key, or force the lock, and get his money and start."[917] In view of such proceedings, openly conducted without hindrance, the Senator appealed to his auditors and to the country to consider whether "this Union can long continue?"[918]
In his famous 7th-of-March speech, Webster freely admitted that the complaints of the South in regard to the non-rendition of fugitive slaves were just, and that the North had fallen short of her duty. He therefore decided to support Mason's Fugitive Slave Bill, although he wanted it amended in certain particulars, and sought especially to have in it a clause securing trial by jury to the refugee in case he denied owing service to the claimant. He criticised the abolition societies of the North, and said he thought their operations for the last twenty years had produced "nothing good or valuable." The press of the South he found to be as violent as that of the other section. There was, he decided, "no solid grievance presented by the South within the redress of the government, ... but the want of a proper regard to the injunction of the Constitution for the delivery of fugitive slaves."[919]
Under the combined championship of Webster, Clay and Calhoun, and to bring about better feeling between the two parts of the country, which in the eyes of many contemporaries seemed on the verge of splitting asunder, the new Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the Senate, August 26, 1850, and by the House a few days later. By the signature of President Fillmore the measure became a law, September 18.