--- "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > O.k. Question.... wasn't the Fugitive Slave Act a > logical extension of > the "full faith and credit" clause (which I believe > was insisted upon > Southerns at the Constitutional Convention who were > worried about slavery > in the new Union - but I could be wrong on that.) > Likewise, is the > Fugitive Slave Act really an all-that-radical > reinterpretation of the > "Interstate Commerce" clause, given the things that > the "IC" clause has > been used for since? And likewise, without taking > the time to go back and > reread my Constitution aren't there other > pro-slavery positions of the > Constitution that woudl justify the Fugitive Slave > Act? > > JDG
Actually, no, it wasn't justified by either. You're close though. Article IV, Section 2. "No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." The Fugitive Slave clause. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, however, was a barbarity that went far beyond what the clause implied. I don't remember the exact details (y'all will have to cut me a little slack - my last class on the Civil War was four years ago) - but the end result was that any white southerner who claimed to have lost a slave could go north, grab the first African-American he saw, slave or free, and force the state to send him south as a slave. Some historian has actually gone through the records of people sent back in this way and determined that most were free blacks, not escaped slaves at all. Basically, the Constitution forbid Northern states from aiding the escape of slaves, but it didn't force them to help Southerners recapture those slaves. That's what the Fugitive Slave Act did, and why it was (among many other things) the worst violation of state's rights, ever. Other than that (and the famous, although usually misinterpreted, "three-fifths" clause) there are few to no mentions of slavery in the text of the Constitution. The Founders understood that slavery was deeply wrong. They also thought it was dying a fairly rapid natural death, so they weren't willing to force the issue. It was, at the time. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin made slavery profitable once again, however, and the pro-slavery doctrine arose soon afterwards. In a sense, you could say that the American Civil War was a product of technological change, actually. Without the cotton gin, slavery would probably have been economically unsupportable, and the South might have been willing to agree to compensated emancipation, or something like that, anyways. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
