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Underground Railroad
Chronology
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1863: A Captured Fugitive Slave Passes Through Harrisburg |
1863
Even though the north and south, in the spring of
1863, were now fighting over the issue of slavery--President Lincoln had
made slavery a war issue with the official issuance of the Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863--fugitive slaves still could not feel
totally safe just because they crossed over the Mason-Dixon line. The
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was still the law, and applicable for certain
situations. One such example is described in the news article,
taken from the Harrisburg Daily Telegraph:
A Fugitive Slave--An officer passed through this city at noon today, taking the cars for Baltimore, in charge of a fugitive slave, whom he was conveying to his "master" in Maryland. The party had traveled all the way from Michigan, and the "slave" seemed to submit to his fate with apparent indifference. Who will say that the laws are not respected and maintained in the loyal States?The Emancipation Proclamation declared that all slaves held in states "in rebellion against the United States" were free as of January 1, 1863. Maryland, a slave state, had never left the Union and was therefore not in rebellion. The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to it, and the lawman mentioned in the article above was within the law in returning the captured fugitive slave to bondage in Baltimore. This injustice left a bitter taste in the mouth of the Telegraph's editor, George Bergner, whose final line in the article was a sarcastic jab at the offensive law. Source:
Harrisburg, PA Daily Telegraph, April 16, 1863.
Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg. Microfilm #3041. |
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This page was updated July 19, 2004.