Constitutional Convention Adopts Fugitive Slave Clause Requiring Northern Complicity

On August 28, 1787, South Carolina delegates Pierce Butler and Charles Pinckney attempt unsuccessfully to include “fugitive slaves” in the Constitution’s extradition clause during Constitutional Convention debates. The following day, August 29, the South Carolina delegation presents a separate fugitive slave provision that delegates accept and place directly beneath the extradition clause. The Committee of Style later refines the language, ultimately producing Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3: “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”

The clause carefully avoids the words “slave” or “slavery” to provide political cover for delegates uncomfortable with explicitly endorsing human bondage in the Constitution, yet everyone understands its purpose. The Convention substitutes “under the Laws thereof” for the Committee of Detail’s original phrase “legally held” to emphasize that slavery exists only through state laws, not federal endorsement—a cosmetic change satisfying delegates seeking moral distance from slavery while having zero practical effect. The South Carolina delegation draws inspiration from the Northwest Ordinance’s fugitive slave clause enacted just six weeks earlier on July 13, 1787, which established the precedent of requiring free territories to return escaped enslaved people. The Constitutional provision passes with minimal debate, demonstrating widespread acceptance among delegates of slaveholders’ “right” to human property.

The Fugitive Slave Clause represents constitutional capture by slaveholding elites who successfully embed federal enforcement of slavery into the founding document, requiring all states—including free states—to become enforcement mechanisms for human bondage. Unlike the Three-Fifths Compromise and slave trade protection which directly benefit slaveholders through representation and commerce, this clause imposes active obligations on free states to violate their own laws and moral principles by capturing and returning freedom seekers. The provision transforms the entire United States into a hunting ground for slaveholders, eliminating any safe haven for enslaved people and requiring northern law enforcement to become slave catchers. This becomes the constitutional foundation for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the even more draconian 1850 version, creating a system where free Black Americans can be kidnapped and enslaved based on minimal evidence. The clause exemplifies how structural corruption operates: elite economic interests (slaveholders) write constitutional protections for their wealth (enslaved people as property) that override state sovereignty, individual rights, and human dignity, embedding institutional complicity in slavery throughout the federal system.