Arguing Against the Blood Hound Law

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Anti-Slavery Tract, "No Slave-Hunting in the Old Bay State: An Appeal to the People and Legislature of Massachusetts." 23pp. octavo, self wraps. Urges the Massachusetts legislature to enact laws to contravene the Fugitive Slave Law, that 'no slave shall be taken back to bondage from its jurisdiction.' It reads in small part: "...Massachusetts was the first recognized sovereignty to abolish negro slavery by solemn act. It is therefore with good reason that we now ask you, a Massachusetts Legislature, to occupy that same van to-day. I think we have a right to claim it of such a government...If the constitutional clause is binding, in your view, then, according to very excellent constitutional authority, the unlimited violation of the Constitution of the United States, on the part of the Southern States, frees you from any moral obligation to the observance of that clause. You will not contend, in 1859, that Mr. Webster in 1851, or Mr. Adams in 1819, had stronger instances to cite of the violation of the Constitution than we have to-day. I have only to recall to your minds, Texas, Missouri, and the Fugitive Slave Bill itself, and the agents of this Commonwealth kicked out of South Carolina, and the door barred by a statute making it a penal offence, punishable in the State Prison, for Massachusetts to send a citizen to that State to bring a case before the Supreme Court for the defense of one of her own colored seamen, - I have only to point you to these repeated acts of aggression, to bring the case we are considering entirely within the rule laid down by Adams and Webster...I claim this as the well-recognized principle of the nation's existence, that any act which the organized authority sanctions, and the people acquiesce in, is the law of the land. The whole of our law grows out of that principle. You cannot vindicate, on sacred charter principles, one single act in the normal history of the States; there is not a constitutional act that is clean. We claim that principle is our behalf today. We want the State of Massachusetts to risk this statute, even if it is outside of the Constitution. We ask her to say to the Union, 'You have been enacting laws for sixty years; we are going to try our hand at it. Massachusetts is good at patents; we do not intend other States shall have a monopoly in this.' By what right do the Republicans of the Senate sit side by side with the Senators of Texas to-day, - every one of them pledged to the principle that Texas has not right in this Union, that it was an illegal act that brought her in, and one half of them pledged to this day to the doctrine that we have no right to acquire territory? By the right and in virtue of the principle, that public acquiescence makes its law..." Much more. VG.The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers. This was one of the most controversial acts of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a 'slave power conspiracy'. It declared that all runaway slaves be brought back to their masters. Abolitionists nicknamed it the "Bloodhound Law" for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves. In 1854, the Wisconsin Supreme Court became the only state high court to declare the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, as a result of a case involving fugitive slave Joshua Glover, and Sherman Booth, who led efforts that thwarted Glover's recapture. Ultimately, in 1859 in Ableman v. Booth the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the state court.

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