Michael Hiltzik: Threats to criminalize out-of-state abortions are a scary reminder of 1850s America
The Fugitive Slave Act was perhaps the most detested law in all American history.
A product of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union as a non-slave state, the act allowed slaveowners, or even purported slaveowners, to pursue escaped slaves across state lines, made harboring a fugitive a criminal act and required local officials to assist the pursuers.
"It was an act without mercy," wrote historian Andrew Delbanco in his 2018 book about pre-Civil War America, "The War Before the War."
The act had been crafted in the hope of quelling emerging regional conflicts over slavery. But it achieved just the opposite.
Abolitionist Rodney French, a Massachusetts merchant and politician, called it the "most disgraceful, atrocious, unjust, detestable, heathenish, barbarous, diabolical, man-degrading, woman-murdering, demon-pleasing, Heaven-defying act ever perpetrated."
The act provoked John Brown to attack the federal garrison at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. It led to the of 1857, widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court decision ever, in which Chief Justice
