Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861 (review)

366CIVIL WAR history formidable array of footnotes which buttress the text shows familiarity with a wide range of more recent scholarly writing. Emma Lou Thornbrough Butler University Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861. By Thomas D. Morris. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Pp. xii, 253. $12.50.) Historians are familiar enough with the manner in which the conventional wisdom of one generation becomes the oppressive burden of later ones. This is especially true if such "wisdom" is enshrined in a nation's organic law, like the American Constitution. The founding fathers displayed such remarkable foresight in so many parts of the Constitution that it comes as a shock to realize how deficient in that quality they actually were when they wrote the clauses dealing with slavery. Consider the fugitive slave clause which prohibited state-imposed barriers to the rendition of slaves who had fled bondage. Might it not have been anticipated that the states, then in the process of freeing their slaves, would face an almost impossible task in attempting to reconcile the legitimate claims of slaveholders with the obvious need to prevent the wanton kidnapping of free Negroes? Despite slaveholders' cavils to the contrary, the first laws adopted by the free states, generally designated "personal liberty laws," represented in the main conscientious efforts to effect such reconciliation. But the central problem, as Thomas Morris makes clear in this thorough and generally lucid account of the evolution of these laws, was that free states necessarily presumed a person to be free until proven otherwise in court, preferably before a jury. By contrast was the slave state's presumptive classification of any black as a slave until the completion of the legal process in which a jury trial was as out of place as an abolitionist at a planter's dining table. Additional complications arose out of the vaguely-defined boundaries between federal and state jurisdictions within which the fugitive slave law must be enforced and opposing claims adjudicated. Could the free states enact laws aimed at testing the legitimacy of a slaveholder 's claim to his property? Emphatically not was the response of Justice Story in 1842 in the Supreme Court's landmark ruling, Prigg v. Pennsylvania. The fundamental right of recaption, i.e., the recovery of the slaveholder's property by his own efforts anywhere in the federal union, had been guaranteed by the Constitution. Otherwise, said Story, slaveholders would not have agreed to join the Union. State boundaries were henceforth meaningless so far as runaway slaves were concerned , and the harsh fugitive slave law of 1850, under which citizens of free states could involuntarily be made into slave catchers, was but a logical extension of the Prigg decision. book reviews367 Morris has focused on the efforts within the five states of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin to employ various common law guarantees, as well as positive law, to protect free Negroes against enslavement. Through the several stages of the escalating sectional conflict, we find the familiar story of the moderates, trapped between their earnest wish to abide by federal law and Supreme Court judgments and a growing antislavery constituency whose extreme spokesmen were demanding that the personal liberty laws actually be used to liberate slaves. As with other aspects of the sectional conflict, in the end there was no room for maneuver. The passage and attempted enforcement of the fugitive slave law of 1850 succeeded only in creating several celebrated cases and enlarging the antislavery constituency ; it delivered up virtually no runaways to slaveholders. Following Lincoln's election, a movement at compromise briefly surfaced during which conservative Northerners sought, unsuccessfully, the repeal of the personal liberty laws as a propitiatory offering to Southerners. At that point, however, those who controlled the South's destiny had no interest in compromise. Morris' research has been prodigious and the product here represents as comprehensive a treatment of such a subject as one is apt to find. But we might as well face it: debates, laws, judicial rulings, and writs do not comprise the subject matter an average reader can take in large doses, and obviously many historians, either for...