So if the South was all about reduction of federal power and increase of state's rights, how does that reconcile with the South using federal power for decades to push the federal Fugitive Slave Act onto the North, threatening anybody who even fed a SUSPECTED runaway with a year in jail and $1000 fine? Using the federal gov't to refuse to allow free blacks in the North to even be allowed to testify in court about whether they were runaway or free?
Interesting to me is that the largest increase in the use of jury nullification was Northerners refusing to convict people violating the immoral and unConstitutional Fugitive Slave Act.
Have you ever looked at this issue in this way?
First,leave the morality of slavery aside. I do not and nobody I know will argue that it is not a blight on the soul of humanity. It has been a terrible evil since slavery was first conceived all those long millennia ago but to better understand the times of the pre- Civil War period this larger slavery question must be set aside.
It was much more an economic issue than a state's rights issue at this juncture.
At the time slavery was legal in the United States and it was a business proposition. Slaves were viewed as personal property.
Large southern slaveholders had huge amounts of their money invested in the slaves. A runaway slave represented a major business loss. As the abolition movement gained steam the large slave owners came under increasingly more pressure and their fiscal losses mounted.
Thus, they wanted a harsh enforcement of a fugitive slave law to protect their interests and dissuade abolitionist intervention.
This harshness in turn led to the jury nullification in the North.
Last edited by hillbillybear; 07/02/15.
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