Slavery and Race in the United States Before the Civil War

The Fugitive Slave Act was a part of a group of laws called to the "Compromise of 1850." Antislavery supporters gained the affirmation of California as a free state, and the preclusion of slave-trading the District of Columbia (Pbs, 2013). Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, as a concession to Southern states, with an end goal to safeguard the Union and because the 1793 Act was ineffective. Progressively, the North was clashing wth the South with respect to the issue of slavery in new states and regions gained from Mexico after the U.S. Mexican War (1846-48). As a consequence of the act, liberated blacks were in some cases constrained into servitude by unscrupulous whites and penalties for harboring slaves were raised.

The Second Middle Passage was a mass migration that happened between the ratification of the Constitution in 1787 and the Civil War (1861). There was a movement of approximately one million enslaved individuals from the upper South to the lower South, 66% of these through the domestic slave trade (Pbs, 2013). It happened in light of the remarkable growth of the cotton industry increasing the demand for more slaves.The Second Middle Passage resulted in slaves being sold on auction blocks bringing about the separation of families. The number of slaves required in the new states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which were cotton plantations, increased each decade.