November 26, 1841

A grand jury indicted escaped slave Nelson Hackett for grand larceny, and Governor Archibald Yell made a formal request to Canadian authorities for Hackett’s extradition four days later. Hackett was an Arkansas slave whose 1841 escape to Canada (then a colony of Great Britain) led to a campaign by his owner to have him extradited to the United States on charges of theft as a way of getting around the legal sanctuary that Canada provided to fugitive slaves. Hackett’s extradition aroused the ire of abolitionists on both sides of the border and ultimately resulted in a limitation of the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty’s extradition provision.

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