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As millions of people were being held against their will, the slave owners were reaping the benefits of free labor, while citizens elsewhere held varying opinions. The more noble citizens in Antebellum America acted as abolitionists, often placing themselves and their families in great peril. Why did ordinary men and women risk their very lives by breaking the law to help strangers? They acted as they did for the greater principle of liberty and justice. Aiding and directing fugitive slaves toward liberty was utilitarian justice and did no harm to slave owners as the legalization of slavery was, in itself, a “bad law,” thus making it the antithesis of a moral right.

[[File:Slave_kidnap_post_1851_boston.jpg|thumbnail|left|250px|A warning posted by abolitionists in Boston, 1851.]]

America was built on the backs of slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, these human beings were second only to land as the most valuable commodity in the southern states. Slave owners, therefore, felt compelled to initiate legislation to protect their valuable, human assets. Although the United States Constitution protected slavery under Article IV, and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 allowed slave owners to cross state lines to retrieve their property, a growing number of abolitionist groups in the North were harboring runaway slaves in order to protect them from the pursuit of their masters. As tensions grew between the two regions of the country regarding the South’s ''peculiar institution,'' the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision in 1842 finding, “the slaveholder’s right to his property overrode any contrary state legislation.”<ref>James McPherson, ''Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era''(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 79.</ref>The Court, however, continued in its opinion that enforcing the Constitutional clause relating to slavery was the onus of the federal government and that “states need not cooperate in any way.”<ref>McPherson, 79.</ref> That being the case, large plantation owners of the South pressured their Democratic representatives in congress to pass the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which mandated “all good citizens” to report their knowledge of fugitive slaves to authorities.

Southerners viewed the Act as a means of frightening the burgeoning network of abolitionists who comprised, in part, the Underground Railroad (UGRR). Slaveholders described the UGRR as a “Yankee network of lawbreakers who stole thousands of slaves each year.”<ref>McPherson, 79.</ref>Criminal punishment of monetary fines and prison sentences were the tools of intimidation employed by the authors of the Act; unauthorized threats came from slave owners directly. Staunch abolitionists, such as Wendell Phillips, vehemently opposed and blatantly disregarded the federal law scarcely one month after its passage. Phillips incited his fellow Bostonians into protecting, at all costs, a pair of fugitives who had enjoyed two years of freedom in Boston before the passage of the Act. Bostonians turned out in droves and soon sent the slave hunters back to the South, empty handed. A newspaper in Boston declared, “Massachusetts Safe Yet! The Higher Law Still Respected,” while a paper in Georgia deemed Boston to be a “black speck on the map.”<ref>McPherson, 83.</ref>Although a victory for the abolitionist cause, not even the great city of Boston was able to continue fighting the growing number of slave catchers infiltrating the Bay State. Going forward from 1850, the UGRR and all other escape networks had to go further north into Canada; the U.S. was no longer able to assure life and liberty.

[[File:slavesale1853.jpg|thumbnail|300px|left|Illustration of a slave auction, 1853. Note, an infant is being sold while the child's mother is begging at the feet of her owner.]]

The paradox of slavery is really quite remarkable. In an essay published one month before the start of America’s Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine denounced the practice of slavery. Paine condemns “Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!)…who wilfully[''sic''] sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.”<ref>Thomas Paine, “African Slavery in America,” ''Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser,'' March 8, 1775, http://constitution.org/tp/afri.htm.</ref>Succinctly stated, Paine suggests the vehement support for slavery was driven by money whereas abolitionists had the desire to see justice served. They achieved this by returning to the men and women of African descent ''their'' moral ''property;'' freedom.

Succinctly put, bad laws are those that contradict morality. Whereas defining morality is a complex philosophical endeavor, bad laws can be simplistically defined as being any legal right that one possesses that violates that moral right of another. Bad laws are laws that one “ought not” to have in the first place.<ref>John Stuart Mill, ''Utilitarianism''(1871, repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 37.</ref>These laws directly harm specific individuals and also prove detrimental to society as a whole. In the case of slavery, the slave is harmed directly. By oppressing the slave and thereby eliminating his potential for happiness, the slave holder eradicates any future utility the slave’s happiness may have provided for the entire society at large, as it is not feasible to separate an individual from the society in which he lives.

[[File:Thomas_Paine1792.jpg|thumbnail|250px|Thomas Paine, circa 1792.]]

No person is ever entirely independent from fellow human beings, thus it can be concluded that the actions of one man potentially affect the actions of many. As mankind is interdependent, the oppressed African-American, either directly or indirectly, changes the course of his society’s history. While the slave suffers, so too does the free man who does nothing, as he unwittingly alters his circumstances by his own inaction. For, it is true that the “grand sources…of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort”<ref>Mill, ''Utilitarianism,'' 13.</ref>That was precisely the role of abolitionists in Antebellum America; they were endeavoring to attain moral justice for one group of people by breaking a United States federal law aimed at protecting the opposing group. The slave owners of the South claimed that not only were those who were aiding fugitive slaves stealing their property, they also cried that abolitionists were doing the slaves a disservice.

Harriet Tubman worked tirelessly to emancipate as many chattel slaves as possible. Born as a slave in Maryland circa 1820, she escaped bondage via her own physical strength and her wits. After securing her own freedom in New York State, she made 19 further trips to the upper South to liberate her family and as many other slaves as possible. She lived as a slave, as a fugitive, and as a free woman. She was the ablest of judges. It was she who had the ability to decide which was more pleasurable as a way of life; slavery or liberty. Tubman best rendered a verdict by stating that “‘there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death…no man should take me alive.’”<ref>Sarah Bradford, ''Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People'' (1886 repr., New York: Corinth, 1961),29.</ref> Harriet Jacobs, another woman who had the courage to flee bondage in order for her children to live in freedom, hid in an attic crawl space for seven years rather than return to her master. The experience of Tubman and Jacobs speaks for the thousands of others who made their way to freedom.

If we return to the beginning, we must do so from the end; from the opposite. That being the case, if a “just person is just because of his knowledge…the unjust person [is] unjust for the opposite reason.”<ref>Plato, ''On Justice,'' 375 c.</ref> If that is factored in with experience, then knowledge becomes wisdom, therefore making it true that “the just person is just because of his wisdom…the unjust person is unjust, then, because of his ignorance.”<ref> Plato, ''On Justice, '' 375c.</ref> We have, it seems, been endowed with justice in the form of wisdom and injustice in the form of ignorance. Further, if people are ''unwillingly ignorant,'' they must therefore be unwillingly unjust. It can therefore be concluded that the just abolitionist acted with wisdom. Finally, it can be deduced that injustice stems from a lack of wisdom and those who continually commit unjust acts are those who are content with, albeit unaware of, their ignorance.

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*[[The Best Historians and Books According to James McPherson]]

*[[What Was the Significance of the Southwest in the Outcome of the Civil War]]

*[[Was the Destruction Perpetrated by Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman Necessary to End the Civil War?]]

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