The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
© Library of Congress, Annals of Congress, 2nd Congress, 2nd Session
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was enacted to correct the “flaws” of Article IV, Section
2 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which stated that fugitive slaves should be
returned to their masters but did not outline the responsibility state governments had
in settling disputes. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 stated that a slave catcher could
seize a fugitive, present him to a judge or magistrate and return the fugitive to their
master. By the 1830s several judges throughout the north began claiming that the Act
was unconstitutional, and several northern states passed personal liberty laws that
made it more difficult for slave catchers to leave with a free person of color.
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The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 broadly stated that runaways in new free states
had to be returned to their owners, but it did not force local governments or settlers
to cooperate in the capture of runaways. Similarly, Article IV, Section 2 of the
Constitution explained vaguely that fugitive slaves or indentured servants “shall be
delivered” to their masters, but it did not clearly elaborate the role of state
governments in settling the disputes.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, formally titled “An Act Respecting Fugitives from
Justice, and Persons Escaping from the Service of their Masters,” stipulated that a
person claiming any fugitive could seize the person and bring him or her before a
judge or magistrate in the state where the runaway was captured. The law did not
explicitly pertain to runaway slaves but was clearly written to favor slave owners.
The catcher had to produce “proof to the satisfaction of such Judge or magistrate”
(either through affidavit or oral testimony taken before a magistrate in their home
state) that the person was in fact owed “service or labor the person claiming him or
her.” Section Four of the act specified that anyone who prevented the fugitive from
returning to their master could be sued for up to $500. Notably, the 1793 act did not
give accused fugitives the right to a jury trial.
Beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, several judges in northern states began to
express their belief that the law was unconstitutional, mostly because it denied a
jury trial to free people of color who were accused of being fugitives. In Jack v.
Martin (1835), chancellor Reuben Walworth of New York argued that he did not
believe the framers of the Constitution would have passed a “law by which the
certificate of a justice of the peace of the state…shall be conclusive evidence of the
right of the claimant” to remove any “free native born citizen” of another state the
writ of habeas corpus (“Fugitive Slave Law of 1793”). Later, in State v. Sheriff of
Burlington (1836), the Chief Justice of New Jersey argued that alleged fugitive slaves
did have the right to a jury trial.
Many northern judges upheld the law, however. In 1842, Justice Joseph Story agreed
that the slave catcher Edward Prigg was justified when he removed a black woman
from Pennsylvania without a certificate of removal issued by a state judge as
required by the state’s personal liberty law (“Fugitive Slave Law of 1793”).
Like Pennsylvania, several states passed “personal liberty laws” as more fugitive
slave cases came to court in the 1820s and 1830s. These laws varied from state to
state but generally obligated slave catchers to get a writ from a state judge or other
state official before leaving the state with the alleged slave, in turn setting a higher
standard for catchers than the federal law and making it more difficult for them to
leave with free people in chains.
It is important to note that personal liberty laws did not make fugitive slaves free
once they arrived. Nor did they prevent slave catchers from entering free states and
claiming black residents as fugitives. These laws made it more difficult for catchers
to leave the state with people who were falsely accused as fugitives. Ultimately, even
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where personal liberty laws existed, the burden of proof fell upon disenfranchised
African Americans to establish that they were free, a difficult thing to do if one was
poor, illiterate, and lacked legal support from sympathetic whites who possessed a
modicum of political influence.
After years of uneven support in the north, Southern slave owners pushed for a
more detailed, refined law during the Compromise of 1850, when the prospect of
new free states in the West seemed to threaten their way of life.
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Works Cited & Further Reading
“Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.” Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the
Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-First Century. Vol. II. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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