Fugitive Slave Clause

The Fugitive Slave Clause of the United States Constitution, also known as either the Slave Clause or the Fugitives From Labor Clause, is Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, which required a "person held to service or labour" (usually a slave, apprentice, or indentured servant) who flees to another state to be returned to the owner in the state from which that person escaped. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, made the clause mostly moot.

The text of the Fugitive Slave Clause is:

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.

As in the other references in the Constitution dealing with slavery, the words "slave" and "slavery" are not specifically used in this clause. Historian Donald Fehrenbacher believes that throughout the Constitution there was the intent to make it clear that slavery existed only under state law, not federal law. On this instance, Fehrenbacher concludes:

Most revealing in this respect was a last-minute change in the fugitive-clause whereby the phrase "legally held to service or labor in one state" was changed to read "held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof." The revision made it impossible to infer from the passage that the Constitution itself legally sanctioned slavery.

Prior to the American Revolution, there were no generally accepted principles of international law that required sovereign states to return fugitive slaves that had fled to their territory. English court decisions and opinions came down on both sides of the issue.

The ambiguity was resolved with the 1772 decision in Somerset v Stewart case. Lord Mansfield ordered that a fugitive slave from Virginia who had reached England, where slavery was prohibited, was a free person who could not be legally returned to his previous owners. Absent a long-standing local custom or positive legislation requiring the return, judges were bound by English law to ignore the prior legal status of the fugitive under foreign laws. Although the decision did not affect the colonies directly and despite a general record of cooperation by northern colonies, law professor Steven Lubet wrote:

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