Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to episode 11 of our Civil War podcast. I'm Rich.

And I'm Tracy. Hello, y'all. Welcome to the podcast. All right. So we spent the last two episodes looking first at some rather unpleasant pro-slavery arguments, and then in the last show, making a fast pass through the Abolitionist movement and showing its importance to the sectional unraveling that led to the Civil War.

But now we want to return to the Compromise of 1850 and the Northern reaction to one specific aspect of it. If y'all remember, the Compromise of 1850 was originally proposed by Henry Clay, but it was ultimately shepherded to passage by Stephen Douglas, a senator from Illinois, under the Compromise, California entered the Union as a free state. But then the Compromise allowed the territories of New Mexico and Utah to be organized according to popular sovereignty.

And basically, popular sovereignty was the policy that said the people of a territory could vote on whether they would apply for admission to the Union as a free state or a slave state, and then the federal government would be bound by the people's decision.

Right. The Compromise of 1850 also said that slaves could not be brought into the District of Columbia to be bought or sold.

This turned out to be something of a hollow victory for anti-slavery advocates, though, since not only was slavery still tolerated in the nation's capital, but according to the fine print of the Compromise, slaves already within the District could continue to be bought and sold like before.

To Stephen Douglas's surprise, the most controversial aspect of the Compromise was that it beefed up the old 1793 fugitive slave law, which was based on Article 4 Section 2 of the Constitution, and which mandated that states return fugitive slaves to their owners.

Because of the old fugitive slave law, most runaway slaves just kept on going until they reached Canada.

In Canada, of course, slavery was illegal, and the presumption of British law had always favored freedom.

But the need for runaway slaves to head all the way to Canada changed in 1842.

That's because over the years, Northern public opinion had been growing more and more disenchanted with the old fugitive slave law, which allowed southern slave owners to pursue and retrieve runaway slaves even in free states.

And so public officials in the North had been offering pursuing slave hunters less and less cooperation until in 1842, the Supreme Court, in Prague versus Pennsylvania, ruled that the old federal law didn't necessarily require northern magistrates or justices of the peace to cooperate with slave owners, especially in instances where slavery captures violated the state's due process laws.

The result of the 1842 Supreme Court ruling was that quite a few northern states enacted personal liberty laws, which were used by many public officials in the North to obstruct the capture of fugitives, and in some instances they even prosecuted southern slave owners for kidnapping.

Such measures infuriated southerners, who were all for states' rights, of course, except when it was northern states' rights that stood in the way of slave owners chasing down their runaway property.

Then southerners were adamantly opposed to states' rights.

Hmm, well where I come from, we call that hypocrisy, but anyway, the new and improved fugitive slave law that was part of the compromise of 1850 endeavored to plug the holes that Prague versus Pennsylvania ruling had put in the old 1793 law.

And realizing this was the case, Yankee senators had attempted to attach amendments to the new law, which would guarantee alleged fugitives the rights to testify on their own behalf, to habeas corpus, and to jury trial.

But southern senators, obstinately vetoed the amendments, saying that such hallmarks of the American justice didn't apply to slaves.

To quote James McPherson from his book Battle Cry of Freedom, the Civil War era, he said,

the fugitive slave law of 1850 put the burden of proof on captured blacks, but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom.

Instead, a claimant could bring an alleged fugitive before a federal commissioner, a new office created by the law, to prove ownership by an affidavit from a slave state court, or by the testimony of white witnesses.

If the commissioner decided against the claimant, he would receive a fee of $5.

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