Anyone who provided assistance to a fugitive risked a hefty fine and whatever other punishment local officials decided to mete out. Fugitives would then be re-enslaved. The nation’s leaders were responding to the proliferation of abolitionist societies in northern states. They were also responding to the Black men, women, and children who decided to live in freedom rather than in slavery.
For George Washington, the very act he signed into being haunted him until death. Ona Judge, a twenty-two-year-old enslaved woman, owned by Washington, ran away from his household in the summer of 1793, when Washington signed the nation’s most powerful Fugitive Slave Act. Washington immediately placed an ad for her recapture, and insinuated in the ad that he did not know what provocation caused Judge to run away. He seemed to not imagine that a human being held in lifelong bondage might desire freedom, especially from his plantation. Ona Judge remained in the free state of New Hampshire as a fugitive from slavery until her death in 1848.
Washington would have been in the middle of a political maelstrom, had he re-enslaved a poor bondwoman who simply wanted freedom in a nation that had prioritized that value in its own fight for freedom from Britain. Although the existence of slavery and powerful laws to protect those invested in maintaining the system were in place, the Fugitive Slave Act amplified the role of the fugitive slave catcher.
In the aftermath of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, slave catchers proliferated. The men who patrolled slave states, free states, and territories created even more fear in the hearts of enslaved people thinking of running away. If a fugitive slave was caught and re-enslaved, the emotional and physical costs would be dire. Slave catchers were motivated by money and also performed a civic duty to a slaveholding nation that protected slavery at any cost. This constitutional protection of slavery helped to create a cottage industry where white duplicity, anti-Black violence, and the privileging of property rights over human rights reigned.
African Americans, especially those who were free, immediately responded to the Fugitive Slave Act. They created political abolitionist organizations that addressed the need for discretion in their liberation work, raised funds for runaways, and advocated the use of armed tactical violence in the name of self-defense. Black abolitionists recognized violence as an inherently American language that white supporters of slavery understood quite well. Although white abolitionists advanced moral suasion as the central tenet in dismantling slavery, Black abolitionists understood that white America would need more than fiery speeches to dissuade them from supporting slavery.
These leaders were also emboldened by leaders of the Haitian Revolution that began in August 1791. Black people in Haiti, who were engaged in a bloody fight for freedom from their French slave masters, used tactical violence as a means for liberation. Enslaved people in the United States were inspired by the Haitian example. In 1795 in Louisiana, still a Spanish colony, African-born slaves, mainly men, developed a plan to revolt. In Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, fifty-seven slaves and three white men dedicated themselves to destroying slave owners’ property, seizing arms, and killing white slave masters. As happened with most slave rebellions, they were betrayed by informants, in this case by Indian people of the Tunica tribe, and almost half of the enslaved conspirators were beheaded. Although the revolt did not happen, the Pointe Coupée Conspiracy served as a potent reminder for white people that enslaved people would fight back. Despite reigning ideologies that espoused so-called truths about Black people’s docility and intellectual inferiority, slave conspiracies not only confirmed white people’s fear of an impending “race war” between angry Blacks and defensive whites but also showed the nation that people of African descent would fight for their right to live and die as free people.
The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was one of the first federal laws to provide universal protection for slave owners against loss of property in enslaved people. It codified anti-Blackness and white supremacy because it signaled that a white person’s claim to stolen property was inherently more important than a Black person’s right to freedom and liberty. It reified that the United States was a nation divided, one that established freedom with whiteness and servitude with Blackness. Most critically for Black people, whether enslaved or free, the United States proved to be hostile to their freedom and hypocritical in its claims for justice and liberty.
In 1850 Congress passed an even more restrictive Fugitive Slave Act, and in the 1860s a violent and bloody civil war exposed the nation’s deep history of anti-Blackness and its commitment to honoring the propertied rather than all its people, especially those of African descent. For African Americans, the Fugitive Slave Acts meant that their fight for freedom and civil rights would be a long and dangerous one. Yet they forged a political consciousness in Black America that extended beyond the borders of the United States and had ties in a developing Black diaspora.
1799–1804
HIGHER EDUCATION
Craig Steven Wilder
At the end of the American Revolution, Francisco de Miranda—a mercenary and future dictator of Venezuela—visited the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) during a journey through the United States. He found it to be a “well regulated” college despite the absence of President John Witherspoon, who was off fundraising. He approvingly examined the model solar system, which was not working, and then toured the town. However, when he reached nearby New Brunswick, de Miranda wrote nothing about Queen’s College (now Rutgers University).
One might dismiss that as an oversight if it had not happened repeatedly. In 1794 Moreau de Saint-Méry—a Martiniquais lawyer who had practiced in Cap François (Cap-Haïtien) before the Haitian Revolution—visited Princeton. He was disappointed with Nassau Hall, the main campus building that was once the architectural jewel of the British American colonies. He offered modest compliments to the library and still-broken orrery, recorded the tuition and fees, and even took an informal census of students from the South and the West Indies. In New Brunswick, Saint-Méry noticed that a bridge had collapsed across the Raritan River, but he too made no mention of Queen’s College.
A couple of years later, Isaac Weld, a topographer from Ireland, surveyed the region. He ridiculed the College of New Jersey: the main building was a plain stone structure, the museum but a couple of display cases, the vaunted orrery useless, and the library just a collection of old theology texts in no graceful order. All colleges in the United States were really grammar schools, he judged. His stage ride into New Brunswick seemed to confirm that verdict. “There is nothing deserving attention in it,” Weld concluded of the village, “excepting it be the very neat and commodious wooden bridge that has been thrown across the Raritan River.”
There was a reason Rutgers wasn’t even on the radar for visitors. The Revolutionary War had left the campus “wasted & destroyed” and scattered the students, as a Rutgers president appealed to the New Jersey legislature, and the whole college was but “a naked charter and little else.”