The Compromise of 1850, which also admitted California as a free state, delivered just that, threatening Northern citizens with stronger fines and even jail time if they did not help recover runaways. After decades of trouble in the North, Southern masters pushed for a stronger fugitive slave law. In the wake of Lincoln's election, several seceding states cited the problem of recovering fugitive slaves as a justification for leaving the Union. Unsurprisingly, liberty and slavery remained a key part of Civil War America.Īlthough slavery's territorial expansion proved to be one of the most divisive sectional issues during the 1850s, the recovery of fugitive slaves in the North also sparked intense debate and even violence between pro- and antislavery forces. A decade later, angry words turned to bloody battles. "While this nation is guilty of the enslavement of three millions of innocent men and women," the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass told a Rochester audience in December of 1850, "it is as idle to think of having a sound and lasting peace, as it is to think there is no God to take cognizance of the affairs of men." That same year, a band of radical proslavery delegates in Nashville urged Southerners to protect bondage at all costs, even if that meant secession. By the 1850s, when a new and more intense round of sectional debate emerged, many Americans wondered if they could see past diverging understandings of liberty and slavery, or if sectional discord would finally lead to disunion and war. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as slavery expanded both demographically and geographically in the South and Southwest and a newly aggressive brand of abolitionism emerged above the Mason-Dixon line, debates over liberty and slavery became enmeshed in almost every part of American social and political life. But American masters secured the first federal fugitive slave law in 1793 and, soon after that, the right to bring slave property into the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, nearly every northern state in the new American Union passed, or at least debated, a gradual abolition law, putting slavery on the path to extinction above the Mason-Dixon line. Well before the outbreak of sectional fighting in 1861, Americans clashed over the meanings of liberty and slavery.
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