'Fed up' crowd in Massachusetts swarms ICE agents attempting to arrest mother

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20. Resisting the Fugitive Slave Law

Resisting the Fugitive Slave Law

In September of 1850, Congress passed five bills known collectively as the Compromise of 1850 in an attempt to defuse North-South tensions over slavery. As a result of the bills’ passage, California entered the Union as a free state, New Mexico and Utah territories were established with the question of slavery left to popular sovereignty; the borders of Texas were set; the sale and trade of enslaved people (although not slavery itself) was outlawed in the District of Columbia; and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 was strengthened to devastating effect.

Freedom seekers were no longer entitled to due process or trial and could be captured solely on an enslaver’s word. Officials who refused to cooperate with the return of freedom seekers could be fined and imprisoned. Although Massachusetts had a personal liberty law—the “Latimer Law”—to protect freedom seekers, Black and white abolitionists also formed the Boston Vigilance Committee and the secret Anti-Man-Hunting League to resist enforcement of the federal law. There were early successes as well as failures. In 1851, abolitionists liberated Shadrach Minkins from the Boston courthouse and conveyed him to freedom in Canada, but another freedom seeker, Thomas Sims, was captured and returned to Georgia. Three years later, the rendition of Anthony Burns, a freedom seeker from Virginia, galvanized Boston. After a failed rescue attempt, thousands witnessed the “vile procession” of federal troops and marshals that conducted Burns to the waterfront and by U.S. revenue cutter back to enslavement.

https://www.masshist.org/features/boston-abolitionists/resisting-fugitive-slave-law

Boston Responds

This law had an immediate impact in Boston. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner declared the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 "a flagrant violation of the Constitution, and of the most cherished of human rights—shocking to Christian sentiments, insulting to humanity, and impudent in all its pretentions." The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society insisted that the law: "be denounced, resisted, disobeyed, at all hazards. Its enforcement on Massachusetts soil must be rendered impossible. The testimony against it must be so emphatic and universal, that no slave hunter will dare make his appearance among us, and no officer or the government presume to give any heed to it. The religious or political journal that refuses to record its protest against the law must be unmasked, exposed, and held up to popular abhorrence."

In early October 1850, Black Bostonians met in the African Meeting House in protest of this new law and called upon their White allies to gather with them at Faneuil Hall to plan their collective response. At this meeting in the Great Hall, together they formed the third and final iteration of the Boston Vigilance Committee to assist freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad.

By October 1850, slave hunters came to Boston in search of Ellen and William Craft, only to be thwarted at every turn. In February 1851, Bostonians, under the leadership of Black abolitionist Lewis Hayden, successfully rescued freedom seeker Shadrach Minkins. Later that spring, despite the best efforts of the abolitionists, slave catchers brought Thomas Sims back to slavery. And in 1854, authorities arrested Anthony Burns in the city’s most infamous and last major Fugitive Slave Law case. The Burns case and changing public opinion led the passage of another Personal Liberty Law in Massachusetts, making it nearly impossible to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in the state.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/fugitive-slave-laws-boston.htm