Debate Over Fugitive Slave Act Raises Questions of “Lawful Authority”
By Beth Folsom, 2026
On April 5, 1851, the Cambridge Chronicle reported that “an alleged fugitive named Robert Symmes was arrested in Boston on a warrant from Geo. T. Curtis, Esq., U.S. Commissioner. Symmes is alleged to be the slave of James Potter, of Chatham County, Ga.” In his struggle against arrest, Symmes allegedly “inflicted a wound” on the Boston policeman attempting to apprehend him. Once Symmes was taken into custody, the lawyers representing him submitted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, but the petition was denied, leaving Symmes in custody at the Boston courthouse. The Chronicle article details the heightened security measures taken at the courthouse to prevent any rescue attempts that might be attempted by local abolitionists, stating that “every arrangement was made to subdue immediately any attempt at open resistance.”
Symmes’s arrest, and the subsequent concerns about forcible resistance, came on the heels of another local case – that of Shadrach Minkins, who had been arrested in Boston in February of 1851 and accused of being a fugitive from slavery in Virginia. In that case, Minkins had been arrested at the Boston coffeehouse where he worked by federal marshalls posing as customers, making him the first person to be apprehended in New England under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Passed as part of the Compromise of 1850 between the so-called “slave states” and “free states,” this Act pushed the boundaries of state vs. federal laws around slavery. Under the new law, an enslaved person could no longer claim freedom by passing into a state or territory where slavery was illegal. Instead, federal authorities were empowered to enter into any area of the country to apprehend a person accused of escaping enslavement, and local authorities were legally compelled not only to conceal an enslaved person, but to actively aid in their capture and return to their enslaver.
In addition to forcing free states and municipalities to recognize the so-called “property rights” of enslavers from other states, the Fugitive Slave Act effectively allowed federal authorities and their local collaborators to capture and detain any person of Black ancestry as an accused runaway, whether they had been born enslaved or free. Under the Act, a Black individual anywhere in the country could be accused of being a runaway; the federal commissioners assigned to hear these cases allowed no testimony by Black witnesses or the accused themselves, so all that was needed was a sworn statement from a white person claiming that the individual apprehended was their “property.” In addition, these commissioners would be paid $10 (the equivalent of about $400 today) if the fugitive was determined to be an enslaved person and only $5 ($200 today) if they were determined to be free, giving them a tremendous incentive to declare Black individuals as escapees whether or not they had been born into slavery.
In the case of Shadrach Minkins, a group of leading Black Boston abolitionists entered the courtroom where he was being tried, overwhelmed the guards, and seized Minkins, taking him to the relative safety of the Black community on Beacon Hill. Soon after, Minkins was taken across the river to the Cambridge home of the Reverend Joseph C. Lovejoy, whose brother Elijah – also an abolitionist – had been murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837. Minkins was soon removed from Massachusetts and spirited north to Montreal along a path of safe houses that served as part of the Underground Railroad. Shocked by the actions of local abolitionists, federal and local authorities in Boston did not pursue Minkins and his rescuers, but the case received widespread attention and led to heightened security at the Boston courthouse for future cases, including that of Robert Symmes.
Symmes disappears from the historical record following his arrest in Boston, and we are left to wonder whether he, like Shadrach Minkins, was ultimately rescued and transported to safety in Canada or returned to enslavement in Georgia, where the Chronicle reported that “he has a wife and children at Savannah, who are free.” But the significance of the Fugitive Slave Act continued to be discussed and debated at length by both Black and white residents of Boston, Cambridge, and the surrounding areas. Should law-abiding Massachusetts citizens assist federal authorities in the capture and return of enslaved escapees? Did the “property” rights of those in states where slavery was legal supercede the right of the self-emancipated to seize freedom upon entering a free state? And, even if the Fugitive Slave Act were legally defensible as applied to those who had, in fact, been born into slavery, what would be the repercussions of effectively allowing any Black person, whatever their condition of servitude, to be seized off the street, held captive in a Northern jail, and sentenced to a lifetime of enslavement in the South?
By the time of the Act’s passage in 1850, the United States had become increasingly polarized along sectional lines, and the federal mandate for Northern states to enforce the pro-slavery agenda of Southern states only fueled the fires of sectional division. In and around Cambridge, this provided leading abolitionists of all races with a rallying point as they argued against a legal system that was encroaching more and more egregiously on the antislavery laws of Massachusetts and neighboring states. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, the Fugitive Slave Act served as a stark example of what abolitionists had predicted would be the takeover of the national government by pro-slavery forces. Resistance to the Act by prominent local Blacks and whites alike helped to consolidate the abolitionist position and create a coordinated effort at legal and extra-legal resistance to the slave system.
