FACTOID #53: If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again - its land area is only ninety-eight percent ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as "barren rock".
In the history of slavery in the United States, a fugitive slave was a slave who had escaped his or her masters often with the intention of traveling to a place where the state of his or her enslavement was either illegal or not enforced. The Underground Railroad existed to guide fugitive slaves on the road to freedom.
FugitiveSlave Laws, acts passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850, intended to facilitate the recapture and extradition of runaway slaves and to commit the federal government to the legitimacy of holding property in slaves.
The statute authorized slave owners or their agents to apprehend fugitives in any state or territory and provided that owners could apply to a circuit or district judge for a certificate to take custody of runaways.
Although the constitutionality of the fugitiveslave laws was unquestioned, only the force of arms could finally define the nature of the Union, its source of authority, and the boundaries of liberty.
The FugitiveSlave Law or FugitiveSlave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slaveholding interests and Northern Free-Soilers and abolitionists.
A major cause of conflict between the Southern slave states and the Northern free states was the lack of assistance given by northerners to southern slave-owners and their agents seeking to recapture escaped slaves.
With the outbreak of the American Civil War, General Benjamin Butler justified refusing to return runaway slaves in accordance to this law because as the Union and the Confederacy were at war, the slaves could be confiscated and set free as contraband of war.
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