Laws
The laws were probably the portion of the class I disliked the most only because I dislike the structure in which our government works. However, this portion of the class was where I learned the most new information. The close analysis of the rhetoric of law gave me an opportunity to connect ideas within the various narratives we read. It was a depressing topic the way people justified their hatreds and prejudices by using law as a tool of justification. Even the law was not straightforward about the situation of slaves, and there were many contradictions to be found. It is unfortunate that law is still being used to justify people's actions towards others, and it is an area of literature that is rarely critically analyzed simply because it is called "law" instead of "literature."
Fugitive Slave Laws
In U.S. history, the federal acts of 1793 and 1850 provided for the return of slaves between free and slave states. Similar laws existing in both North and South in colonial days applied also to white indentured servants and to Native American slaves. As slavery was abolished in the Northern states, the 1793 law was loosely enforced, to the great irritation of the South, and as abolitionist sentiment developed, organized efforts to circumvent the law took form in the Underground Railroad. Many Northern states also passed personal-liberty laws that allowed fugitives a jury trial, and others passed laws forbidding state officials to help capture alleged fugitive slaves or to lodge them in state jails. As a concession to the South a second and more rigorous fugitive slave law was passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. By it “all good citizens” were “commanded to aid and assist [federal marshals and their deputies] in the prompt and efficient execution of this law,” and heavy penalties were imposed upon anyone who assisted slaves to escape from bondage.
When apprehended, an alleged fugitive was taken before a federal court or commissioner. He was denied a jury trial and his testimony was not admitted, while the statement of the master claiming ownership, even though absent, was taken as the main evidence. The law was so weighted against the fugitives that many Northerners, formerly unconcerned, were now aroused to opposition. New personal-liberty laws contradicting the legislation of 1850 (and described, with some reason, by Southerners as equivalent to South Carolina's notorious ordinance of nullification) were passed in most of the Northern states.
Abolitionists fearlessly defied the 1850 act, often mobbing federal officials in attempts to rescue fugitives. The whole dispute, combined with the question of the extension of slavery into the territories, served to set the two sections at each other's throats. The actions of Northern states in nullifying the fugitive slave laws or rendering “useless any attempt to execute them” were cited (Dec. 24, 1860) by South Carolina as one cause for secession. Both acts were finally repealed by Congress on June 28, 1864.
Information
Jim Crow Laws
The term Jim Crow comes from the minstrel show song "Jump Jim Crow" written in 1828 and performed by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, a white English migrant to the U.S., the originator of blackface performance. The song and blackface itself were an immediate hit. "Jim Crow" became a standard character in Minstrel shows, being a caricature of a shabbily dressed rural black; "Jim Crow" was often paired with the character "Zip Coon," a flamboyantly dressed urban black who associated more into white culture. By 1837, Jim Crow was being used to refer to racial segregation.
In the United States, the Jim Crow laws were made to enforce racial segregation, and included laws that would prevent black people from doing things that a white person could do, and vice versa. For instance, Jim Crow laws regulated separate use of water fountains, public bath houses, and separate seating sections on public transport. Jim Crow laws varied among communities and states. The term is not applied to all racist laws, but only to those passed post-Reconstruction starting about 1890, the start of a period of worsening race relations in the United States. Similar laws passed immediately after the civil war were called the Black Codes. These were the codes that transformed into the Jim Crow laws of the twentieth century. Jim Crow laws were a product of the solid Democratic South. As the party which supported the Confederacy, the Democrats quickly dominated all aspects of local, state and federal political life in the post-Civil War South, right up through the 1970s. Even as late as 1956, a resolution condemning the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was read into the Congressional Record, and supported by 96 Southern Congressman and Senators, each one a Democrat.