“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar; And return to Virginia, what belongs to Virginia.” — Anon
THE NORTHERN STATES IN America were also called free states. However, for the Negroes, the states’ interpretation of freedom was relative. What was common was that slave-trading was not allowed in the free states. In these states, some residents had slaves, and the freedmen and free-born Negroes were segregated. In some of the northern states, slaves born before the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 remained slaves until after their Civil War in 1865. These “free” northern states allowed outsiders to bring in their slaves for limited periods. This was usually for periods of 6 to 9 months at a time. If that period elapsed, a slaveholder could go out of the state with their slave and then return after a day. With this simple sleight, the slaveholder would be allowed to once again hold on to their slave for the allowed period.
Centuries down the line, people reading about the iniquitous conditions in American slave states may wonder why the slaves put up with the vile practice. Why put up with the daily depredations, the constant degradations, and the repeated deprivations? Why not rebel or escape the evil?
Escape was not easy at all. Failure, which was the default result, often ended up in death or the mother of all flagellations, and/or significant physical disability like cut Achilles tendons or cut hamstrings and mutilations. The mutilations were used as punishment and as one way of identifying the slave if he ran away in the future:
However, tens of thousands of slaves still took the chance, though the chips were heavily stacked against them. For starters, the whole poisonous scenario was played out in a vast geographical area. This meant weeks or months of furtive travel before escapees could reach a “safe” area. The distance from the southern-most parts of the slave states to the Canadian border and safety is roughly the same as that from Cape Town, at the bottom tip of Africa, to Lusaka in Central Africa. That’s about 2,000 kilometres of hostile country. The distances in the slave territories further north were, of course, less than this.
After out-running or outfoxing the bloodhounds that were kept to hunt escaped slaves, the escapees faced numerous other obstacles. Not least were the slave patrols and slave catchers. Additionally, any white person could stop a coloured person to check on their papers. If the slave did not have a proper pass or if the manumission papers of the coloured person were suspect, any white person had the right to arrest that person. Then there were slave catchers after the reward posted for escapees. By some estimates, only less than 0.1 percent of slaves who wanted to escape the vile practice actually made it to the northern states or Canada. In most cases, the escapees were recaptured and taken back to their evil owners, who, without fail, gave the recaptured slaves a right royal thumping.
Escape to the north was made doubly difficult with the introduction of fugitive slave laws. The first Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1793, by President George Washington. Officials from the free states ignored this law, despite the requirement that they should assist slaveholders or their agents to recapture runaway slaves. As a result of the disdain for this law, the escape of slaves through channels like the Underground Railroad (UGRR) grew. The slaveholders in the south were furious at this and threatened to break away from the Union. In 1850, to pacify the slave states and make them stay within the Union, a more stringent Federal Fugitive Law was passed. What the southern slaving states wanted, and got, was to criminalise those who failed to comply with the law to return any slave who escaped from the south to the “free” northern states.389 Fugitive Slave Laws
With this law, in the free states, it became a criminal offence to aid and abet fugitive slaves on pain of a large fine or imprisonment. If caught, such slaves were to be sent back to the states they escaped from. Slave catchers went around all the states capturing escaped slaves and kidnapping black people and labelling them as escapees, for the sake of claiming rewards or selling them down south. At times, kidnappers used other Negroes to hoodwink and disable unwary Negroes.
Slaves to be returned to “their owners” were denied a jury trial and prohibited from giving evidence in their own defence. Captured slaves, in the free states, were taken before a justice, and all that was needed was for the slave catcher to swear that the black man he was holding was an escaped slave and papers for deportation would be issued. Those justices who ruled for deportation were paid double the rate compared to those who freed the captives. This law was patently unfair since any Negro, slave or free, could be arrested and removed to the southern states.
Did Americans care? Some did, but southern slave-owners were supremely happy with the pepped-up law. However, there were many in the north who were appalled and affronted because the law forced them to support slavery or face a fine or prison. Each of the future combatants had yet another reason for their civil war. Many northerners were unhappy to be criminalised for being against slavery, and the southerners were unhappy at the northerners for not supporting their addiction to slavery.
President Millard Fillmore, who took over from President Zachary Taylor, signed the new Fugitive Slave Bill into law, “to keep the Union intact and prevent a civil war”. With a large number of slave-owning Americans in the southern states and a significant number of Americans opposed to slavery in the northern states,
