Under Article 4, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution, the so- called “fugitive slave” clause, masters and their agents held a right to track down runaway slaves in free states and take them back to the South. Congress had affirmed that right in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which included stiff penalties on those who aided fugitives during their escape. The abolitionist and national statesman Salmon P. Chase made a name for himself by challenging the fugitive slave law, a task that became more daunting after 1842, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that the Fugitive Slave Act was indeed constitutional. In 1847 Chase asked the Court to revisit their Prigg decision in Jones v. Van Zandt, where he defended a person accused of harboring fugitive slaves.