Report of the Select Committee on the Petitions to Prevent Slave Hunting in the State of New York.

With potentially-interesting provenance…

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“Shall the soil of the Empire State be longer polluted by the track of the slave hunter? Shall we ourselves be subject to his call to chase and catch his human prey? Shall we be subject to fines and imprisonments, for refusing thus to degrade and dehumanize ourselves?”

Report on the issues of slave hunting and personal liberty in New York State issued by a select committee of the state Assembly. The Report documents the consternation of New Yorkers, citizens of a “free” state, in the decade following the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

That law compelled federal officials to arrest or capture escaped slaves—even in “free” states, like New York, who had ended slavery. The Report, which uses the word “Liberty” 13 times is clear about the need to enact personal liberty legislation:

The petitioners, whose prayers the Legislature is urged to consider, are not concerned about an imaginary grievance… They ask the protection of the greatest republican State in the world, in behalf of her 45,000 colored citizens, whose liberty is imperiled by an unjust and despotic law of the United States; of 3,400,000 white citizens, who, by the same law, are reduced to the alternative of becoming kidnappers of human beings, or criminals before the statute; of the cause of human freedom, which is outraged and abused in New York, by the existence of the fugitive slave act of September 18th, 1850. (p2)

The above cited reference to this slavery issue not being imaginary may be an oblique reference to the 1852 legal case of Lemmon v. New York which was affirmed by the New York Court of Appeals in 1860, the same year as the present legislative report. That ruling and subsequent affirmation effected the release of eight slaves brought into New York owned by Juliet Lemmon of Virginia and firmly established that New York was a free state.

This copy of the Report bears the ownership inscription of James B. Richards, possibly Dr. James B. Richards, a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and later Secretary of an anti-slavery mass meeting held New York’s Cooper Union on March 6, 1862.¹

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