When Does Power Concede? Thwarting MAGA Will Take More Than Protest and Symbolic Resistance.

By the 1830s, an anti-slavery constituency formed among Northern Whigs led by the congressman (and former president) John Quincy Adams. It became popular to defy the South by refusing to extradite fugitives or persons charged with aiding escapes. A pattern was set in 1837–38 when Whig and then Democratic governors in Maine denied Georgia’s demand for the rendition of an enslaved stowaway and the captain of the ship on which he escaped.

The most famous instance of this de facto nullification was the “Virginia Controversy” of 1839–42, during which New York Governor William H. Seward resisted five Virginia governors demanding the extradition of three Black seamen, New York citizens, who helped an enslaved person to escape from Norfolk. Seward’s rationale here bears special notice for our time. He wrote one governor that extradition was valid in his state only if the supposed crime was “treasonable, felonious or criminal,” and it was “not a felony nor a crime” in New York to help someone escape from bondage, adding that “it is absurd in this State to speak of property in immortal beings, and consequently of stealing them, as it would be to discourse of a division of property in the common atmosphere.” Not only that. In 1840, he signed a bill mandating jury trials for alleged fugitives from slavery, and in 1841 approved legislation revoking the “nine months law” which permitted slaveholders to bring their chattels into the state.

Seward and his Ohio ally (later governor) Salmon P. Chase took the doctrine of a state’s right to guarantee liberty to the Supreme Court in 1842 and lost in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, when the court voided the conviction of a professional slavecatcher. But the Prigg decision also removed the requirement that state authorities cooperate in recapture. As a consequence, individual states and localities continued to turn a blind eye to “rescues” of captured fugitives, often by free Black folk.

Matters came to a head after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That draconian legislation repealed habeas corpus for all persons of African descent in the “free” states. The reaction across much of the North was violent outrage. In 1852, the Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings told a mass meeting, “I would sooner see every slave holder of the nation hanged then to witness the subjugation of northern freemen to such a humiliating condition. If this law continues to be enforced, Civil War is inevitable.”

Spectacular rescues ensued, from Christiana just above Pennsylvania’s border with Maryland (where a slaveholder was killed) to Syracuse’s “Jerry Rescue” and multiple confrontations in Boston. Powerful political figures like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens defended the men arrested during these actions, whom juries proved singularly unwilling to convict.

Beginning in 1854, as the new Republican Party coalesced, eight Northern states passed stringent personal liberty laws. The resolution by Vermont’s General Assembly in 1858, following the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, gives their flavor: “That all laws of Congress which recognize the right of property in man, or deprive any person of liberty without due process of law and a jury trial…are unconstitutional, void, and of no effect…. That these extra-judicial opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States are a dangerous usurpation of power, and have no binding authority upon Vermont, or the people of the United States.”

Dred Scott was the final straw, as it guaranteed slaveholders the right to take their human property anywhere in the United States and erased any possibility of Black citizenship. The Wisconsin legislature nullified it, and Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court followed suit when queried by the legislature whether Black Mainers could still vote as they had since the state’s founding. It was a short route from there to Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and then secession, when four of the slaveholding states cited the refusal to return fugitives as a central reason for leaving the Union. They had been met with power, and retreated.

What is the lesson of this history from our seemingly distant past? Constitutional scholars will likely declare it irrelevant, given more recent precedents, and no one can imagine that this Supreme Court—any more than the court led by Chief Justice Roger Taney that issued Dred Scott—will support states and cities that defy Trump. This is not a legal strategy, in any case—no more than resistance by New York or Ohio to the slave power’s domination was.

It is as political as could be: putting up a wall against oppression, securing a border for freedom, creating sanctuaries for the oppressed, refusing to cooperate with a government that validates cruelty via mass deportations of the undocumented and persecution of anyone involved in abortion or gender-affirming care.

That was the implication of what Governor Pritzker said: Now we must expand the zone of freedom state by state—by any means necessary. The fighting words of Vermont’s legislature in 1858 seem fresh: “Whenever the government or judiciary of the United States refuses or neglects to protect the citizens of each State in their lives and liberty, when in another State or territory, it becomes the duty of the sovereign and independent States of this Union to protect their own citizens, at whatever hazard or cost.”