Fugitive Slave Act: Finkleman Vs. Baker

These two papers about the Fugitive Slave Act propose the idea that maybe, not all is as it seems in the fight against defining humans as property. The accounts in Finkleman’s essay about the slaves who were able to go free because of the way the law was written as well as Baker’s essay about the way the ruling were interpreted in various way gave insight as to how the fight was brought to the South and their incredulous ways of treating people like chattel; the other side of the Baker’s paper shows, however, that the South, disgruntled by the lack of enforcement by the Northern states even with the new law pushed back and used the Fugitive Slave Act to capture or even kidnap those free blacks in the North. The importance of Finkleman’s essay is in the stories about the variety of ways the North corrupted the Fugitive Slave Law in a good way. The Law as it was intended, or so it is discussed in both papers was to add magistrates and justices that could give …show more content…
The essay shows that the North wasn’t just going to lie down and let the spicy Southern temperament get whatever it wanted from the North regarding slaves and the return of its “property.” The south was doing everything it could and it still wasn’t satisfied with how the North was dodging slave laws. The South was seriously threatened by the way the North was getting around the slave law. Baker’s essay discuses how the bitter South found ways to fight the North and recapture and return as many slaves as they possibly could to the North. In Bakers essay, he brings up the “Gag Rule” which was adopted by the House and the Senate preventing abolitionist laws from being passed. The South refused to the let the North abolish slavery and these two texts tell tales of the vicious legal dogfight that kept slavery from being completely abolished or