Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 24: Frederick Douglass and the Compromise of 1850

The controversial core of the famous Compromise of 1850 was the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law, which infuriated many free-state citizens who were being required to be complicit in returning escaped slaves to their owners and masters in the slave states.

The escaped slave and major abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was not at all happy about it either. He had contempt for the Great Compromiser and Kentucky Senator Henry Clay who had played a major role in negotiating the package of agreements:

[W]hatever the contemporary [1950] admiration for Clay's parliamentary abilities and personal incorruptibility, Douglass could have no good word for a man who owned fifty slaves. Singling out Clay's first proposal, that of admitting California as a free state, Douglass unloosed his choicest irony. "This liberal and generous concession to be fully appreciated," he wrote, "must be viewed in the light of the fact that California has already, with singular unanimity, adopted a constitution which excludes forever the foul system of bondage from her borders. . . . Mr. Clay's proffered liberality is about as noble as that of a highwayman, who, when in the power of a traveller, and on his way to prison, proposes a consultation, and offers to settle the unhappy difficulty which has occurred between hiμiself and the latter, by accepting half the contents of his purse, assuring him, at the same time, that if his pistol had not missed fire, he might have possessed himself of the whole."¹

Benjamin Quarles also provides Douglass’ analysis of the goals of the Slave Power (slave states) at that juncture:

To Douglass and his fellow abolitionists there existed in 1850 a slave power conspiracy. Douglass believed that this plot of the "slavocracy" embraced "five cardinal objects. '' He listed them. ''They are these: first, the complete suppression of all anti-slavery discussion; second, the extirpation of the entire free people of color from the United States; third, the unending perpetuation of slavery in this Republic; fourth, the nationalization of slavery to the extent of making slavery respected in every State of the Union; fifth, the extension of slavery over Mexico and the entire South American States.”

The only one of that list that may have been a bit overblown is the last one. Maybe.

This conspiracy was not a “conspiracy theory” in today’s meaning. It was pretty obvious from what the slave states were actually doing in Congress.

Quarles notes that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law provoked a number of escaped former slaves living in the North to flee to “cold Canaan” (Canada). And he notes that “[t]he unpopularity of the Fugitive Slave Law thus dated from the hour of its passage.” And for good reason!

The abolitionists focused on showing the citizens of the free states the danger the Fugitive Slave Law was to their own freedom:

Douglass and the abolitionists … began to stir the collective conscience of the nation by stressing the fact that more than the slave was at stake; freedom itself was at stake. Highlighted by the Fugitive Slave Law, the abolitionist crusade perceptibly broadened from a sympathetic effort on behalf of the slave to a deep concern for the preservation of civil liberties in America.

It's worth noting that many abolitionists were ready to use force to resist the efforts of fugitive-slave hunters to send their fellow citizens back to slavery. A month after the passage of the new law, Douglass addressed an antislavery meeting in Boston:

Charles Francis Adams [son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams], after stating the object of the meeting, called first upon Douglass, asking him especially"to state the condition of the colored people under this new act for their oppression. '' Arising amid an ovation, Douglass did not mince words. The colored people of Boston, said he, had resolved to suffer death rather than return to bondage. "We must be prepared should this law be put into operation to see the streets of Boston running with blood.”

That didn’t occur in Boston. But the conflict that came to be called Bleeding Kansas – which was not simply a metaphor - broke out in 1854 and was a “small civil war in the United States, fought between proslavery and antislavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas under the doctrine of popular sovereignty.”²

1. Quarles, Benjamin (1950): Douglass and the Compromise of 1850. Negro History Bulletin 14:1. 24, 19-21. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44212401>

2. Editors (2024): Bleeding Kansas. Britannica Online 03/14/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Bleeding-Kansas-United-States-history> (Accessed: 2024-24-04).