Slavery had always been a problem in the early United States for obvious reasons. Most states north of the Ohio River were antislavery and had it abolished, while the southern states glorified slavery. But what was stopping slaves, with the aid of northerners and abolitionists, from escaping north and becoming freemen? Southern slave owners and bounty hunters were. But capturing these said fugitive proved difficult for these owners and hunters. So some of them turned to hunting and capturing free blacks and selling them into slavery. All this led to tension between the states which forced the United States Congress, lead by the VP John Adams, to draft up the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which was passed on February 12 by President George Washington in an attempt to ease the problems caused by slavery. This document, though, may have even furthered the divide between the North and South with its supposed purpose and the significance it had on both sides moving forward. The law stated that all states were required to capture and arrest fugitive slaves and have them returned to their state and owner and anyone who interferes in this process would …show more content…
Since the law basically approved the hunting of fugitive slaves, Northerners took offense to this and intentionally refused to enforce the law and then set up resistance groups and built safe houses to aid the slaves in their escape to the North. They even went a step further by passing what they called “Personal Liberty Laws”, which protected free blacks and gave the accused fugitives the right to a jury trial. The North’s blatant disregard of the law basically nullified the law which greatly angered Southerns. This soon resulted in the second fugitive slave law being passed in 1850, which gave stricter guidelines and harsher punishment, which caused even more controversy and intensified the tensions of the states to the point of secession and