FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT Definition & Meaning

Fugitive Slave Act

A law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which provided southern slaveholders with legal weapons to capture slaves who had escaped to the free states. The law was highly unpopular in the North and helped to convert many previously indifferent northerners to antislavery.

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Three years earlier, President Washington had signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

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The Fugitive Slave Act adds new rules for stricter federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

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He feared that once he returned to America, he could be forced back into bondage under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

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And even Washington’s friends and admirers had come to weigh their changing beliefs against Washington and the Fugitive Slave Act.

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King County, originally named in 1852 for Vice President William Rufus de Vane King, a slave owner and advocate for the Fugitive Slave Act, was renamed for the civil-rights hero in 2005.

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Fugitive Slave Act

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