Why did Southerners feel they had a right to retrieve an enslaved person who fled across state lines?

Why did Southerners feel they had a right to retrieve an enslaved person who fled across state lines?

Retrieve an enslaved person who fled across state lines. What did Southerners believe that Article 4, Section 2, of the Constitution gave them the right to do? The idea that people living in a territory had the right to decide by voting if slavery would be allowed there before the Civil War.

What did the Constitution say about slavery?

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

What did the law say about enslaved people who ran away to this new territory?

Concerned that these new free states would become safe havens for runaways, Southern politicians saw that the Constitution included a “Fugitive Slave Clause.” This stipulation (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3) stated that, “no person held to service or labor” would be released from bondage in the event they escaped to a …

Why did slaves want to escape?

Of course, the main reason to flee was to escape the oppression of slavery itself. To assist their flight to freedom, some escapees hid on steamboats in the hope of reaching Mobile, where they might blend in with its community of free blacks and slaves living on their own as though free.

What happened to runaway slaves if they were caught?

Many captured fugitive slaves were flogged, branded, jailed, sold back into slavery, or even killed. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 also outlawed the abetting of fugitive slaves. Their safety and freedom would not be reached until they entered into Canada. Not all slaves traveled north.

How does the Constitution deal with slaves and the issue of slavery?

The specific clauses of the Constitution related to slavery were the Three-Fifths Clause, the ban on Congress ending the slave trade for twenty years, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave insurrections. Interestingly, they avoided the word slave and referred to slaves as persons.

What was the main argument that Southerners made in defense of slavery?

Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse. The tobacco crop would dry in the fields. Rice would cease being profitable.

How did Southerners justify slavery quizlet?

White Southerners justified slavery by saying that someone needed to produce all the cotton and without the slaves, no one would do it, and the cotton kingdom would fall apart. They believed without slavery, blacks would become violent, and that slavery provided a sense of order.

What is one reason for the spread of slavery in the southern colonies?

England’s southern colonies in North America developed a farm economy that could not survive without slave labor. Many slaves lived on large farms called plantations. These plantations produced important crops traded by the colony, crops such as cotton and tobacco.