History of the United States I / Unit 14 USH1 1963 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Commissioner's Fee
The idea
The Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty put each case before a federal commissioner rather than a court. There was no jury. The alleged runaway was not permitted to testify. The commissioner received ten dollars for sending a person south into slavery and five dollars for a finding of freedom. Northerners who aided escapees faced heavy penalties and imprisonment, and so did those who refused to join a slave-catcher's posse, so that many northerners felt coerced into slave-catching against their values.
In practice
A decision-maker paid twice as much to reach one of the two available findings, with no jury to check him and the defendant kept silent.
Where people slip
The fee schedule is the entry, and it is the twin. A student who remembers the Act as a harsh law has missed what made it radicalising. The asymmetry did more to persuade ordinary northerners that a Slave Power existed than any abolitionist tract had managed, because it was visible on the face of the statute itself.
Your place on the trail
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