such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney, is hereby
empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and to take
him or her before any judge of the circuit or district courts of the
United States, residing or being within the state, or before any
magistrate of a county, city or town corporate, wherein such seizure
or arrest shall be made, and upon proof to the satisfaction of such
judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit taken
before and certified by a magistrate of any such state or territory,
that the person so seized or arrested, doth, under the laws of the
state or territory from which he or she fled, owe service or labor
to the person claiming him or her, it shall be the duty of such
judge or magistrate to give a certificate thereof to such claimant,
his agent or attorney, which shall be sufficient warrant for
removing the said fugitive from labor, to the state or territory
from which he or she fled.

It will be observed that by the terms of this enactment a master had
the right to recover a fugitive slave by proving his ownership before a
magistrate without a jury or any other of the ordinary forms of law. A
human being was thus placed at the disposal of the lowest of courts and
subjected to such procedure as was not allowed even in petty property
suits. A great field for the bribery of magistrates was opened up, and
opportunity was given for committing to slavery Negro men about whose
freedom there should have been no question.

By the close of the decade 1790-1800 the fear occasioned by the Haytian
revolution had led to a general movement against the importation of
Negroes, especially of those from the West Indies. Even Georgia in 1798
prohibited the importation of all slaves, and this provision, although
very loosely enforced, was never repealed. In South Carolina, however,