U.S. Congress

The Fugitive Slave Act was part of the Compromise of 1850, a body of legislation designed to placate both the proslavery South and an increasingly antislavery North. Instead, the compromise, especially the Fugitive Slave Act, served to fan the flames of sectional discord. The compromise's major components were the admission of California as a free state, and, to pacify the slave interests who favored allowing slavery's westward expansion, a new, more stringent Fugitive Slave Act to supersede the existing 1793 version.

For nearly two decades Southern politicians had been hotly complaining about the perceived interference and "agitation" of abolitionists with a legal institution. They accused antislavery activists of inciting slaves to rebel and run away, of flooding the South with abolitionist propaganda, whether through the words of pamphlets or itinerant preachers. The new Fugitive Slave Act specifically criminalized the act of...