Trying to pick out important pieces of the history of black people in America is hard. It is like a jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces interesting in and of themselves and important to the whole. The difference is that remarkable black individuals each have their own story, which is part of the bigger story, but it's not always easy to tell about the context of their lives without picking up the narrative of the broader influences upon their lives. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugi...aw_of_1850 is an important piece providing context, especially for understanding Abolitionist and the escalation of violence culminating in the Civil War.

This excellent page of Eric Fonner of Columbia University put up by PBS www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i3094.html provides some insight into the law and its significance. I will also add that it's merely one page in a treasure trove of information about the experience of Africans in America. You can access other pages by choosing the links at the top of the page.

While many northern states made laws prohibiting slavery, Fonner points out that it was a national institution and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 helped to bring the conflict over slavery to the national stage. He says:

"The Constitution has a clause stating that fugitives from labor (slaves) must be sent back to the South if captured in the North. And this gave slavery what we call extra-territoriality. That is, it made slavery a national institution. Even though the northern states could abolish slavery, as they did, they still could not avoid their Constitutional obligation to enforce the slave laws of the southern states. A fugitive slave carried with him the legal status of slavery, even into a territory which didn't have slavery."

Fonner points out that the southern states' insistance about "state's rights" was phony; the insistance was for slavery. The Fugitive Slave Law "was the most powerful exercise of federal authority within the United States in the whole era before the Civil War" he says. With Abolitionist feelings running high in the North and a general preference for the power of states to make law, the federal marshal operating with bounty hunters were an afront not just to black people (free people of color were always in danger of being kidnapped) but also to free white people in the north.

Ripon Booth's War www.wlhn.org/topics/boot...ar_intro.htm which began in the spring of 1854 with the arrest of Sherman Booth the editor of an Abolitionist paper the "Free Democrat" in Milwaulkee. There were few supporters of slavery in Wisconson and Booth's arrest led to a series of court challenges that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Legal issues so often seem dry and arcane, and very often unsatisfying; very much in the manner of a judge's retort to the protests of a convicted prisoner: "This is a Court of Law not a Court of Justice!" The case that found it's way to the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with important issues of federalism and the Court ruled in favor of federal power over state's power. When Federal Marshals arrested Booth he was "liberated" by friends and the long search to find him was covered sensationally in the press. For some the incident when it finally came to a head in 1860, and the attention paid to it, not just in Wisconson but around the country, represented the responsibility to the high ideals of the nation's founding, while to others grew fearful of the polarization dividing the land.

It's rather remarkable how the Red state/Blue state map of president Bush's election win so neatly matches the divide in the country at that time. Indeed today we are polarized too and the fault lines are still very often about race. This page the U.S. Marshall's put up has a great picture depicting a Marshal and a bounty hunter chasing a young woman and her child. They juxtapose that picture with a photograph of Federal Marshals enforcing school desegregation at a school in New Orleans. The basic message is "We're just doing our job." That seemed unsatisfying to me, but it's a helpful reminder that as a citizen I have a responsibility to impress my representatives with my views of justice and to hold them accountable for their lawmaking. (Right here and now I'm boiling mad about the crooks their corruption!)

The Fugitive Slave Law impinges on other important developments of the day, in particular the westward expansion and the quest for American Empire. In the military today it's common for them to speak of the military operations "against the terrorists" as "Indian Wars." It's unsettling to hear that rhetoric, although I understand that it comes from many streams of the U.S. Army's history and tradition--that glum reality. While the Fugitive Slave Law was not enforced by the military, rather the iron fist of statist power, the tactics used by the state in both by Federal Marshals and the Army in the Indian wars can both be called "terroristic." The institution of slavery required a police state to maintain it.

I'm not bright or savvy enough to really identify what it is we here in America are so polarized about today. But one of the areas which there is real division is the arrest, kidnapping, redition, and torture at the dictate of the president. I'm quite at a loss to understand why so many find the application of these powers a good thing, but they do. Naturally in the mid-nineteenth century many felt the police state worked to their advantage; I suppose the same is true today.

It's just me, and I know it, but growing up in the South as a boy when I would hear racial invective, I always felt like that hatred was directed at me too. I was born in Virginia, but with parents from New England, I never was regarded as a southern boy, and I knew they hated yankees. What I didn't grasp fully was the complection of my skin entitled membership into the clan, albeit on a lower rung. My parent's sometimes called me their "Rebel child" something I always took as endearing. But I never took to the Confederate Stars and Bars. A neighbor has one emblazened on their silo here in western Pennsylvania! I strongly suspect some of the pleasure I felt in being called a "Rebel" is the pleasure they find in flying that damned flag. I can't understand their shamelessness about it though.

There are lots of civil war resources on the Web with images from the period. Here's a site with some pictures from the era xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/J...itive.htm The National Park Service has some great pages and I got the image used from pages from the Boston African American National Historic Site www.nps.gov/boaf/fugitiveslavelaw.htm Here are some more images www.historywiz.com/gallerie...riend.htm Dogs were so important not only for tracking, but clearly from the images for intimidation as well.

I'm a real wuzz when it comes to depictions of violence, particularly in movies. It's rather embarassing really and as a result I miss out on some worthwhile films. So when videos of beheadings find their way to the Internet, you can be sure I don't view them. With the recent release by Australian Public Television of a second set of photos of tourture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq I probably would have escaped seeing any of them, if not for a blog called Bagnews Notes and this post there bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagne..._.html The pictures of a soildier using a dog to intimidate a bound prisoner aren't the most graphic (in fact the one which made my stomach churn has no prisoner in it at all, just a floor spattered with his blood) nevertheless I thought of those Abu Gharib pictures when I saw so many pictures of dogs in the fugitive slave pictures of the era.

State power is mighty. All of the cruelty we might imagine, and even more, has been used by agents of state power through history. Now an unprecidented military is fighting an agressive war spanning numerous countries all over the world. Agents of presidential power, in contravention of foreign laws, international treaties, and our own laws, are kidnapping and rendering people into the hands of bruts for turtoure. We operate torture facilities in multiple places and on ships flying my flag. All of this with the pretense of legal power granted to the president through authorization by Congress for operations in Afghanistan. At home our communications are being intercepted, outside legal procedures in place and without oversight, at the command of the president with the same legal justification. These are some of the issues polarizing us in the U.S. today, and the map reads red and blue. Like in the days of the Fugitive Slave Act the South demanded "State's Rights" all the while vigorously demanding federal enforcement brutality in defense of their "peculiar institution."

So now the "limited government" Republicans holding all levers of federal powers ridicule and disparrage those of us who want checks on presidental powers and the rule of law. What an irony that it's the party of Lincoln advancing these horors.