The Fugitive Slave Act: The Compromise Of 1850

The Fugitive Slave Act was part of the group of laws referred to as the "Compromise of 1850." In this compromise, the anti slavery people gained the admission of California as a free state and the prohibition of slave-trading in the District of Columbia. This law allowed slave hunters to gather any runaway slaves who escaped from one state into another or into a federal territory. It also allowed them to seize alleged fugitive slaves without due process of law and it it was often presumed that a black person was a slave, so the law threatened the safety of all blacks even the free ones. Passage of this law was so hated by abolitionists, however, that its existence played a role in the end of slavery a little more than a dozen years later. This law also continued the slaves to use the Underground Railroad, a place of over 3,000 homes and other areas that helped escaping slaves travel from the southern slave-holding states to the northern states and Canada. The Fugitive Slave Act

The Compromise set into motion with the Fugitive Slave Law, a sad thing that happened to both free and slave African Americans, and their abolitionist allies. In Boston especially the free Black community was tested in ways that it had not been tested before, a test that, once it was passed, would shock Black Bostonians into fighting for their freedom. The Americans wanted to resolve the conflict over the spread of slavery developing into the western territories. As early as 1643, colonists had recognized a need for the regulation of fugitive slaves. After the Revolutionary war, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. This gave the slave owners legal support seeking their fugitive slaves. Massachusetts took action because they had recently freed their slaves, they managed to establish a personal liberty laws which protected citizens from slave