The Fugitive Slave Bill; Its History and Unconstitutionality; With an Account of the Seizure and Enslavement of James Hamlet, and His Subsequent Restoration to Liberty.

(1-3), 4-36p. Modern brown cloth. Printed paper front label. Third edition of the 1850 law and the same year's rare initial editions, featuring the "only printed record of Hamlet's case", documenting his arrest and trial, along with text of the bill, details pf congressional votes and coverage of a mass protest meeting of Black New Yorkers at the A.M.e Zion Church stating their resolve to meet force with force in defense of "our lives and liberty". "James Hamlet was the first fugitive slave arrested and remanded under the Fugitive Slave Act of Sept. 18, 1850. He was seized just eight days after the law was passed. Hamlet claimed to be a free man because his mother had been free. His testimony was now allowed, however, under the act of 1850. After a brief hearing, he was returned to Baltimore. a subscription fund was quickly raised and he was purchased from his master for $800. On October 5 Hamlet returned to New York where there was an integrated demonstration of four to five thousand people" (Finkelman, Slavery in the Courtroom, 85). The Fugitive Slave Act "is universally considered to be among the most unfair and illegitimate laws ever passed by Congress. [it] authorized private individuals to 'seize or arrest; alleged fugitives without any warrant or other judicial scrutiny (Finkelman, Let It be Placed Among the Abominations). To Frederick Douglass, it utterly "forged his political conscience. nothing had ever forced him to clarify his principles like the reality of the Fugitive Slave Law." A month after its passage, he stood before a cheering crowd in Boston and "urged all Northern Blacks to be 'resolved rather to die than to go back'. If a slave catcher sought to take the slave back, shouted Douglass, he "will be murdered in your streets" (Blight, 241). In his preface, Lewis Tappan declares the Act 'a disgrace to the nation, an act of extreme cruelty". Sabin 26125. Text fresh with light scattered foxing, mostly to the preliminary leaves.…