Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Lessons for Today

I've been reading a long book so great I have to force myself to put it down. It is Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo. The principal story is about the escape of two slaves, a young husband and wife. The wife's father was a white slave owner and mother a slave. She had the physical characteristics of a white person. She dressed as a wealthy white male, practiced such a persona and her husband pretended to be "his" slave. They traveled north under the guise the "man" needed medical attention and a male slave tending to him.

One part of the story was what happened after they arrived in Boston. While they were living more or less in the open there, Congress and the President signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It gave slave owners the power of the Federal Government to enforce the return of fugitive slaves who had escaped to northern free states. Slave owners in the South hired bounty hunters and vigilantes to go north, find escaped slaves and return them to slavery and punishment. The hope of slave owners was that the Act would reduce the cost of finding and returning slaves.  

 While some slaves were returned because of the act, others kept escaping. During the period of the Act more escaped than were returned. One of the problems was northern Sheriffs, police chiefs and judges found ways to delay and/or sabotage the slave hunters. It was the period of the "underground railroad." A huge part of the public did not share the view slaves were not humans and their well-being ignored. This made retrieving run-away slaves mostly unsuccessful. 

While reading the book and its reviews of what various groups in the U.S. were thinking at the time, I could not help but notice the similarity to today's anti-abortion zealotry. Slave owners back in 1850 could not understand resistance to slavery. The Negro was not a full human being. The treatment of slaves was not a matter of interest.  The slave owner held legal title to his/her slaves to how could it ever be that the escaped slave could not be captured and returned. Did northern people and Quakers have no moral standards? Did they want a country filled with disorderly behavior? Many historians believe the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 pushed the country into an unresolvable dilemma that could only be solved by the Civil War which began six years later.

Today, the anti-abortion political faction in the U.S. does not see the woman as important enough to merit concern. I have asked repeatedly on this blog for anti-abortion readers to tell us what rights a woman can have other than be forced to give birth. The question is not a relative one to them because the woman and the woman's well-being does not exist in their thinking. 

As with slavery, there will never be a compromise about abortion. One side has to prevail and force conformity over the other.