"Guaranteed employment until death" (the practice of slavery has been upheld and defended by law in the past).

• Author: Watson, Jack

In 1850, the Congress of the United States, in solemn session, passed a law that created federal court commissioners to determine claims respecting fugitive slaves. It required United States Marshals to apprehend such slaves, on pain of a fine of the then staggering sum of $1,000 for dereliction of duty coupled with the risk that the Marshall would have to pay the owner the full value of the slave should the Marshall allow the slave to escape. In addition, a person who abetted the escape of a slave could receive a 6 month prison term.

The commissioners would receive $10 for any verdict rendered in favour of a master, and $5 for a verdict in favour of a slave. It is said to have cost the federal government $100,000 in May of 1854 to provide a military escort for the return of slave Anthony Burns through truculent crowds of anti-slavery Boston citizens to a ship to return him to Virginia.

Frederick Douglass was a United States Marshall for the District of Columbia from 1877 to 1881, but he apprehended no slaves during that time. A brutal and protracted Civil War in the middle of that 27 year period ended slavery in the United States, and, as a murdered President had said, it tested whether a nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal "can long endure". Hundreds of thousands of Americans died, and millions were wounded or dispossessed, but the nation did endure. This was a fire that Douglass had come to advocate, desperate in the belief that no other means to emancipation lay open to people like him -- a man who had stolen his own arms and legs from his master, and ran off with them.

Just before that Civil War, the United States Supreme Court had made a ruling in favour of the penal laws to uphold slavery. This decision probably contributed to the war's outbreak. The Court ruled in support of the ability of a state to pass laws allowing the forcible recovery and return of slaves to their masters, in March 1857, in a case that is well known as the Dred Scott decision. Six years before Abraham Lincoln said otherwise, Chief Justice Taney wrote of the nation's most hallowed document:

"It then proceeds to say: `We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers...