Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

The Fugitive Slave Law, also called Fugitive Slave Act was an American law that forced the executive branch of the Northern states, escaped slaves to their owners passed in the southern states again. The law was passed by Congress on 18 September 1850. It was part of a compromise experiment between the northern and the southern states, and was one of the most controversial parts of the compromise package. In the northern states it increased fears of a conspiratorial plot by the slaveholding South.

Within the black population in the north and the abolitionist movement was stirring against the law of large protest that. Persons in the criticism mainly against President Millard Fillmore, who signed the law, and the slavery favorable Secretary of State Daniel Webster taught Abolitionists called the law disparagingly Bloodhound law. There were solidarity actions and Immunities of captured fugitive slaves. The Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin declared the law in 1854 in the negotiations on a prisoner relief for violations of the Constitution void. However, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the decision of Wisconsin in 1859 for not permitted. South Carolina took the law as an opportunity to withdraw from the Union before the outbreak of the Civil War.

The law was ultimately in the northern states only relatively rarely used. A number of northern states enacted within their means additional regulations that required, for example, that a jury had to evaluate if it really was an escaped slave to someone. Other States said that in local jails escaped slaves were allowed to be established in order to organize their repatriation. For all runaway slaves who had settled in the northern states, but the law was life threatening. Many of them fled further north - in the end by the existence of the Underground Railroad - and settled in Canada.