Answer: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
Frederick Douglass would call it the “man-stealing act.”
The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. … There is more protection there for a horse, for a donkey, or anything rather than a colored man — who is therefore justified in maintaining his right with his arm.
Under the Fugitive Slave Act, aid to escaping slaves was a federal crime, punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in prison. Under a bounty system, the law created the office of commissioners, who determined whether a black person was in fact a slave. They were paid $10 for every slave they returned to slavery but only $5 for every one they determined to be free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I will not obey it, by God.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe decided to begin a series of sketches of life among enslaved people that was serialized in the National Era. In March 1852, they were published in book form as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly.
Read more in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War.
Don’t Know Much About the Civil War (Harper paperback, Random House Audio)
