For decades, slave catchers, as well as slaveholders and professional kidnappers had prowled the streets of the city, assaulting Black Americans by any means to enslave them. And while black and white Pennsylvania abolitionists, especially those living in Philadelphia, fought tooth and nail to protect the Black community, even persuading state officials to pass “liberty laws,” that placed hefty fines on kidnappers, slave catchers, and even slaveholders, the recent passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 rendered all their efforts obsolete.
“The author noting down narratives of several freeborn people of color who had been kidnapped,” in Jesse Torrey, Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in the United States, 1817.
Thus, Gibson may not have been the slightest surprised when the notorious slave catcher George Alberti, Jr. and his minions arrested him and dragged him to the Old Statehouse (today’s Independence Hall). Alberti suspected that Gibson was a fugitive from slavery named Emery Rice. Now with the power of the federal government behind him, the slave catcher had no qualms bringing Gibson before a federal judge and “returning” him to slavery. But how did the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act come about?
Everyone knows how freedom and slavery jostled for position during the founding of the United States. Several founders own enslaved people while affixing their names to a Declaration of Independence that pronounced “all men are created equal.” Debates over enslavement rocked the Constitutional Convention. The infamous Three-Fifths Compromise between the slaveholding states and the states that abolished slavery or passed gradual abolition laws apportioned extra representatives to the slaveholding states by counting three-fifths of the enslaved population and ushered in decades of southern dominance in Congress. Furthermore, slaveholders and their northern allies came to dominate the presidency: John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln represented the only non-slaveholding, non- “Doughface” (i.e., northerners with southern sympathies) presidents prior to the Civil War.
