The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

by James Oakes

Because some nations clung to slavery while others were abolishing it, international borders began to attract fugitives and soon enough those borders became sources of diplomatic tension.

It guaranteed slaveholders a summary right of recaption, but it left the regulation of fugitive slave renditions to the free states.

African Americans who had built families and worked as free people in the North for decades were vulnerable to re-enslavement at any time. If there were signs of local opposition federal marshals could conscript northern citizens into a posse, forcing them to participate against their wills in the capture and return of alleged fugitives.

“There is much controversy about delivering up fugitives from service or labor,” he began. Everyone who swears an oath to the Constitution is of course swearing to uphold the fugitive slave clause.

“[I]n any law upon the subject,” he suggested, “ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence be introduced, so that a free man may not, in any case, be surrendered as a slave?”

“[A]s free colored persons born within some of the States are citizens of those States,” Curtis concluded, “such persons are also citizens of the United States.” Dred Scott therefore had the right to sue and be sued in federal court.

After the War of 1812 John Quincy Adams, virtually alone, denied that the laws of war legitimized military emancipation.

The prisoners were nearly starving because the federal marshal, Ward Lamon—one of Lincoln’s cronies—pocketed most of the funds used to feed them, as had Lamon’s predecessors.