Personal Liberty Laws
© The State Library of Massachusetts
Several Northern states passed Personal Liberty Laws to combat legal loopholes made
possible by the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. The
Constitution did not give any rights to enslaved people and the Fugitive Slave Acts
maintained a fugitive’s legal status as a slave. Personal Liberty Laws varied by state
but all made it more difficult for slave catchers to capture fugitives. Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, Maine, and Rhode Island passed laws that forbade law enforcement
from helping slave catchers in any capacity. These laws upset southerners and were
opposed by some Northern states, namely Ohio, where liberty laws were repealed.
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At the heart of the Underground Railroad and the fugitive slave crisis was the legal
reality that “free states” and “slave states” had different laws regarding the practice
of slavery. When individuals like Henry Bibb, Henry “Box” Brown, and Margaret
Garner fled north, they were essentially pitting lawmakers against each other
because it was not clear to what extent free states were obligated to support slave
catchers. The Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 were supposed to resolve these
issues by guaranteeing that fugitive slaves remained legally slaves even when they
fled to states where slavery was illegal. Thus, as federal laws, the Fugitive Slave Acts
provided slave owners the legal framework to reclaim their “property” from states
where people were not recognized as property. The central problem was that the
legality of slavery was left up to the states; the Constitution guaranteed liberty as a
natural right while sanctioning bondage at the same time.
Between the 1830s and 1850s, in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, the
rising trend of northern abolitionism, and the increase of runaway slaves fleeing
northward, lawmakers in states as diverse as Vermont and Illinois passed statutes
aimed at protecting runaways and free people from slave catchers. These laws are
generally known as the “Personal Liberty Laws,” but the degree to which they dealt
explicitly with fugitives and/or free people differed from state to state.
The Fugitive Slave Acts outlined only basic procedures that slave catchers had to
follow when they wanted to reclaim fugitives from free states—namely that they
had to produce proof in the form of oral testimony or affidavit that the said fugitive
was indeed property. Not surprisingly, the laws did not offer any legal protections to
slaves nor did they outline any protections for individuals who may be falsely
accused as such. Since the Fugitive Slave Acts (and the Constitution) guaranteed the
slave owner’s property rights and forced free states to recognize these rights,
northern state abolitionists had to create statutes that added nuance to the federal
legislation rather than laws that contradicted the laws of 1793 and 1850. In short,
the Personal Liberty Laws did not make slaves legally free when they entered states
like New York, Vermont, and Michigan—they made slave catching more difficult.
Although liberty laws varied from state to state, they shared similar traits. Only four
states—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Rhode Island—passed liberty laws
to discourage, penalize, or forbid state officials who intended to enforce the federal
legislation. Maine’s 1855 law, for example, specified that any state official who
granted a slave catcher a certificate of removal had to withdraw from their office
and was forever banned from “any office of trust, honor, or emolument” in the state
(Campbell 172). Since these laws abided by the Supreme Court’s 1842 decision in
Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which excluded state courts and magistrates from
responsibility for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, these laws were
constitutional even though they made enforcement considerably difficult (Campbell
173).
Six states passed personal liberty laws that framed the fugitive slave issue as a
kidnapping problem. By forcing slave catchers to bring their case before a court,
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these laws aimed to do two things: protect citizens of color from being falsely
accused and taken away without a hearing and to slow the removal of people
residing in the state who were indeed fugitive slaves. What is fascinating is that
some of these laws essentially granted basic Constitutional rights to slaves by
granting them due process, thereby throwing the chattel principle into question
(Morris 3-6). Four states—Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Wisconsin—
extended the writ of habeas corpus and the right of trial by jury to accused fugitives
(Campbell 179).
Personal Liberty Laws distressed southerners and even met fierce resistance in the
north, especially in Ohio, where the state’s law was repealed ten months after it
passed. New York, New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota did not pass liberty
laws in the 1850s (Campbell 185). Southern lawmakers argued that the laws
recused the free states from fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities and
pointed to the acts as examples of northern efforts to nullify slave owners’ property
rights (Morris 1).
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Works Cited & Further Reading
Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law,
1850-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.
Morris, Thomas D. Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
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