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Many years ago, as a marketroid for a major company, I was forced to go through that 7 Habits of Highly Effective Corporate Drones shit. It’s overexplained common sense motivational pablum. Habit number 4 is “Think win-win.” That’s what happened in America with the Compromise of 1850 to defuse tensions between slave and free states. Except the enslaved didn’t win shit, because the free states agreed they’d return any fugitive enslaved people who’d managed to escape.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 18, 1850--
The U.S. had a war with Mexico and the U.S. won and stole a bunch of territory that had already been stolen. The slave states looked at all that newly thieved land and said we should totally be allowed to own slaves there and northerners feared a “slavocracy” of enslavers holding too much political power, so they said no fucking way. And the south was pissed and things were already moving toward a possible secession/war so they said hey let’s figure out some win-win compromise here.
That compromise involved the several hundred enslaved who escaped to the North every year. There already was a Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, but it didn’t have a lot of power of enforcement. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—part of the overall Compromise—went into effect on September 18 and it “solved” that “problem.”
The 1850 act gave teeth to the 1793 one, saying that state and federal judicial officials in free states must assist with the returning of fugitive enslaved people who had fled to their jurisdiction. If they failed to arrest a fugitive enslaved person, they faced a fine of $1,000, which today is probably like a million dollars or some shit. Hang on, a website told me it’s about 35 grand. Still a lot. Likewise, any citizen who aided an escaped enslaved person got the big-ass fine plus six months in the slammer.
The law was such a piece of jurisprudential dog vomit that it wouldn’t let accused fugitives testify on their own behalf. For example, a free Black person was accused of being a fugitive enslaved person and was going to be “returned” to slavery. They couldn’t take the stand and say I’m free and I can fucking prove it. It’s more fucked up than that. The federal commissioners who decided if someone was free or enslaved? If they said yeah that dude’s free, they got paid $5. But if they ruled the person was enslaved? Ten bucks! I’m gonna fugitive slave my way to a new swimming pool!
Did you see that movie 12 Years a Slave? It’s about a free Black man captured and forced into slavery. That happened all the time, and this law made it easier. But hey, the Act was praised in Washington with cries of “The Union is saved!” But it really wasn’t. It created a shit-ton of animosity on both sides anyway, and 11 years later there was a big fucking war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in history.
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