with their children, in Newgate Prison, and her attention was turned to prison-reform. By her efforts a school and manufactory were begun in the prison, an association formed to improve the prisoners and provide them with religious instruction, and a matron was appointed. Mrs. Fry visited prisons in different parts of Great Britain and on the European continent, everywhere effecting ameliorations. She died at Ramsgate, Oct. 12, 1845. See Life by Mrs. Pitman.
Fuegians (fū̇-ē′jĭ-an), or inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego are an interesting race, having a language or, rather, several languages different from all other known tongues. Several tribes are to be distinguished among them, including the Ona in the northwest, the Aliculuf in the center and the almost extinct Yahgans. All these tribes are ill-clothed and sheltered, yet skilled in basketry and in the making of weapons and canoes. It is likely that they will before long be extinct, for the owners and herdsmen of sheep are making sad havoc among them.
Fugitive-Slave Laws, The, were laws formerly in force in the United States to enable slave-owners to reclaim slaves who had escaped from them into another state. As slavery was a state affair, being recognized in some states and not in others, the logical outcome seemed to be that a slave ceased to be a slave when he entered a state in which slavery was not tolerated. This was true, unless one held strictly to the view that a slave was simply the private property of the owner, in which case the private property could be recovered through the intervention of Federal officials. On the assumption that a slave was private property, the Fugitive-Slave bill of 1793 was passed, giving the alleged owner the right to seize a person whom he could prove, before judge or local magistrate, to be his fugitive slave, and remove him to his own state. This law was much abused by kidnappers of free negroes, since a negro so seized was practically at the mercy of one who was willing to swear that he was his escaped slave, and the alleged slave was debarred from the right to demand a writ of habeas-corpus or a trial by jury.
Meanwhile states prohibiting slavery in some instances passed laws with a view to nullifying the laws permitting slave-extradition in this fashion, on the ground that state laws were here supreme. This led to much agitation on the part of slaveowners, and led to the passing of the Federal law of 1850 which denied the right of a slave to a writ of habeas-corpus or a trial by jury, and placed the enforcement of the law entirely in the hands of the officials of the Federal government. This second fugitive-slave law was repealed in 1864.
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| MELVILLE W. FULLER |
Fuller, Melville Weston, chief-justice of the supreme court of the United States, was born at Augusta, Me., Feb. 11, 1833, and graduated from Bowdoin College and Harvard Law School. In 1855 he was admitted to the bar and practiced for a time at Augusta, Me., but removed to Chicago and pursued his profession there until 1888, when he took the oath of office as chief-justice, the post being offered him by President Cleveland. In the sixties he was a member of the Illinois state legislature, and was repeatedly delegate to the Democratic national conventions. Bowdoin College, Northwestern University and Harvard each conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D. He died July 4, 1911.
Fuller, Sarah Margaret, Marchioness Ossoli, an American author, was born at Cambridgeport, Mass., May 23, 1810. After the death of her father, a lawyer and congressman, she supported herself for some time by teaching. Later on, in Boston, she edited The Dial. In 1844 she wrote Women in the Nineteenth Century, and in the same year, at the invitation of Horace Greeley, she went to New York and contributed articles to The Tribune, which were afterwards collected as Papers on Literature and Art. She afterwards went to Europe, and in 1847 met at Rome the Marquis Ossoli, to whom she was soon after married. She entered with enthusiasm into the struggle for Italian independence. In 1849, during the siege of Rome, she took charge of a hospital; and, on the capture of the city by the French, she and her husband and their child, after a period of hiding, set sail for America in 1850. The vessel was driven on Fire Island, near New York, by a violent gale in the early morning of July 16; the child's body was found on the beach; but nothing was ever seen afterward of Margaret Fuller or her husband. See Life by T. W. Higginson.
Fulton (ful′tŭn), Robert. When Robert Fulton launched the first steamboat, the Clermont, on the Hudson River, in 1807, his old friends in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, probably were not surprised. They had always expected the quick-witted, ingenious Irish boy, who had grown up among them, to do something remarkable, and they were proud and glad of his success. He had been such a manly, good-tempered,
