[Sidenote: English Law. Northwest Ordinance.]
=§ 14. Ordinance for the Northwest Territory.=--Since all the thirteen colonies recognized slavery, the Revolution made no difference in any previous intercolonial practice as to the delivery of slaves; in framing the Articles of Confederation no clause on the subject was thought necessary. The precedent of the New England Confederation was forgotten or ignored. But the action of the States of Vermont, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, in taking steps toward immediate or gradual emancipation, from 1777 to 1784, brought up a new question,--the status of fugitives in free regions. Before the change of conditions in the States was completely understood, the same question had arisen in the Western territories. Jefferson, in 1784, proposed to draw a north and south line through the mouth of the Kanawha, west of which there should be no slavery after 1800.[48] The next year a Northern man proposed a similar limitation in the territory north of the Ohio, and added a clause for the return of fugitive slaves to the original slave States.[49] Neither of these two propositions was carried, but the principles both of exclusion of slavery and of the return of fugitives appear in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the first legislation by Congress looking toward the surrender of fugitives by any Territory or State. In providing a government for the new Territory, it was enacted, July 13, 1787, that "any person escaping into the same from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid."[50] The fugitive clause seems to have provoked no discussion, but to have been accepted as a reasonable condition of the limitation of slavery.
[Sidenote: Fugitive Question in Constitutional Conventions.]
=§ 15. The Fugitive question in the Constitutional Conventions.=--While the Northwest Ordinance was passing through Congress, the Philadelphia Convention was framing a new Constitution, and the return of fugitives was again eagerly insisted upon by the slave States. The necessity of some positive stipulation that fugitives should be returned was felt to be even more necessary in a Constitution meant permanently to bind together a free and a slaveholding section. The only debate of which we have a record occurred August 28, 1787. Mr. Butler of North Carolina pressed the point in behalf of the Southern States. To his first proposition, "that fugitive slaves and servants be delivered up like criminals,"[51] Mr. Wilson objected; he saw no reason for obliging the state to arrest fugitives at public expense, while Mr. Sherman saw no more propriety in the public seizing and surrendering a slave or servant than a horse.[52] Mr. Butler therefore withdrew the proposition. He soon introduced a more particular provision, which was accepted and inserted in the Constitution, as follows:--