Stanley Campbell<\/a>‘s famous figure that 82.2% of alleged freedom seekers who appeared before U.S. commissioners were remanded to slavery.\u00a0Campbell harnesses this statistic to paint a portrait of an effective body of federal officers implementing the 1850 law throughout the north. Disgruntled southerners, he writes, \u201chad no way of knowing\u201d that the rate of rendition was as high as 82.2%. [1] However, this blanket statistic overlooks the crucial reality on the ground\u2014the reality that slaveholding claimants encountered every time they headed north. Not only were commissioners unavailable in many areas, but the lion\u2019s share of renditions under the law occurred in a small cluster of spaces; elsewhere, throughout much of the free soil north, the law was seldom, if ever implemented. Campbell\u2019s statistic would have done little to placate slaveholders\u2019 underlying frustrations with the new law: they had demanded an effective, prompt and above all national<\/i> force of federal officers who could aid them in recapturing enslaved men and women. By 1851, it was becoming increasingly apparent that this imagined force was far from a national reality.<\/p>\nFinally, I stress that in the three main hubs of enforcement which emerged during the period 1850 to 1854 (New York City, Philadelphia and Harrisburg, PA), a small group of aggressively pro-slavery U.S. commissioners worked in tandem with pro-law shadow groups to implement the statute. While recent scholars have largely overlooked these dynamics on the ground, I will need to find a compelling historiographical pitch to make the chapter’s overarching argument clear and comprehendible to readers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n[1] \u00a0Stanley Campbell,\u00a0The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860<\/i>\u00a0(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 125, 135, 200-207.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I finish up my initial draft of Chapter 1, I’ll need to work on refining my historiographical arguments and making abundantly clear what new insights my research has to offer. To begin with, I argue that when explaining the law’s failures, historians have tended to gravitate to the latter half \u00a0of the decade, where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3689,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20694,80913],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historiography","category-research-strategies","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3689"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}