Reclamation of Fugitives from Service is the name under which the abolitionist lawyer Salmon P. Chase published his 1847 brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Jones v. Van Zandt. The case challenged the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, by which people all over the United States, whether in a slaveholding state or not, were required to return slaves as property to their slaveowners. A former slaveholder named John van Zandt turned abolitionist and began helping the Underground Railroad in Ohio spirit slaves away to Canada in defiance of the act. He was therefore sued by a Kentucky slaveholder named Jones for the restitution of Jones’s investment in the slaves van Zandt had taken from Jones. Chase defended van Zandt and made an eloquent argument that the Constitution did not allow the federal government to create or maintain slavery. Because the Constitution recognized no slaves but only persons, when an enslaved person left the jurisdiction of a state where slavery was legal, he or she ceased to be a slave. The 1793 law deprived alleged fugitives of their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights by seizing them unlawfully and depriving them of due process. Although the Supreme Court ruled against van Zandt, Chase’s analysis of the Constitution as a fundamentally antislavery document became highly influential in northern abolitionist circles when he published his defense as a pamphlet.