Thomas Jefferson Sends Official Notice of the Statutes of the 2nd Congress, Including the Fugitive Slave Act

Scarce letter from one signer of the Declaration of Independence to another.

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The 2nd United States Congress, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives, met at Congress Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from March 4, 1791 to March 3, 1793, during the third and fourth years of George Washington’s first term as President. The apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives was...

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Thomas Jefferson Sends Official Notice of the Statutes of the 2nd Congress, Including the Fugitive Slave Act

Scarce letter from one signer of the Declaration of Independence to another.

The 2nd United States Congress, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives, met at Congress Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from March 4, 1791 to March 3, 1793, during the third and fourth years of George Washington’s first term as President. The apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives was based on the provisions of Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution.

In the 2nd session of this 2nd Congress, it passed, and President Washington signed,  the Coinage Act establishing the U.S. Mint, an Act to establish the Judicial Courts of the United States, and an Act for Trade and Intercourse with the Indian tribes. Soon after, the Militia Acts enabled the President to call in state militia in case of invasion or rebellion, a power of which Abraham Lincoln availed himself in 1861. The first state to be added to the Union after the original 13 – Vermont – was admitted at this time and Kentucky soon followed.

The second session saw enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the first Federal attempt address the conflict that arose when a slave escaped North to a state that considered him free, while his original state still considered him property and demanded his return to slavery. The Act gave teeth to the provisions of the U.S. Constitution that protected slavery, making it a Federal crime to assist an escaping slave, and establishing the legal mechanism by which escaped slaves could be seized (even in free states), brought before a magistrate, and returned to their masters. The Act made every escaped slave a fugitive-for-life, liable to recapture at any time anywhere within the territory of the United States, along with any children subsequently born of enslaved mothers.

Back then, it was customery for the Secretary of State to provide official notification of new laws to the individual states, and to provide collections of these acts at the end of sessions of Congress, in part as a courtesy but mostly to place the states on legal notice of their enactment. Considering the hostility in New England towards returning escaped fugitives to slavery, it would have seemed more than prudent to set the Fugitive Slave Act on record there.

Letter Signed, Philadelphia, April 19, 1793 (18th anniversary of the “Shot Heard round the World” beginning the Revolutionary War), to “His Excellency The Governor of the State of New Hampshire,” who was then fellow Signer Josiah Bartlett. “I have now the honor to send you herewith enclosed two Volumes of the Acts passed at the 2d Session of the 2d Congress of the United States, together with an index for the same, and for those of the first session already sent; and of being with sentiments of the most perfect respect…” The letter is docketed in Bartlett’s hand on the verso of the blank integral leaf: “Secretary of State, April 19th 1793.”

The Mint and Judicial Acts worked out well, as did the provision to bolster the national defense. Not so the act for intercourse with the Indians, nor the attempt to bolster slavery by making aiding runaways a crime. The same problem was still being dealt with in 1850, and the step after that was Civil War.

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