Fugitive Slave Act Of 1850 Essay

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was originally enacted in 1793, but amended in 1850. It is a law that allows slave owners to capture and return runaway slaves. The Act further mandates the Northern states to aid in the capture of runaway slaves or be fined. The Act created several reactions especially from the black communities of the North who were looking to free slaves of the south. The Act brought danger of slavery close to them as well, and no black person was safe under the new law. The Act led to some black people fleeing the United States for Ontario, Canada.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1854 creating the Kansa and Nebraska Territories but leaving the question of slavery open to residents, thereby repelling the Missouri Compromise. The Northerners were outraged by the decision because the Missouri compromise which had endured for about thirty four years as a basis for sectional accord on slavery was been threatened.

In 1845, Scott sued his master’s widow for freedom on the grounds that the laws in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory barred slavery. The case was dismissed by Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland (who apparently came from a slave state) on the basis that black people where not citizens, therefore Dredd Scott was not an American citizen and he had no right to sue and that because he was a slave, he was so inferior that he had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. This decision was very unsettling to the thousands of free slaves especially in the south because by stripping them of their citizenship the court had made them vulnerable to reenslavement or expulsion. To the blacks, the enemy was no longer the enemy, but the very government from which they had hoped for