Washington and Congress responded with a series of racist measures: naturalized citizenship was denied to black immigrants; blacks were barred from serving in state militias; the Southwest Territory that would soon become the state of Tennessee was permitted to maintain slavery; and two more slave states were admitted (Kentucky in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796). On February 12, 1793, Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act, which overrode state laws and courts, allowing agents to cross state lines to capture and return escaped slaves.[286] Many free blacks in the north decried the law believing it would allow bounty hunting and the kidnappings of blacks.[287] The Fugitive Slave Act gave effect to the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause, and the Act was passed overwhelmingly in Congress (e.g. the vote was 48 to 7 in the House).[288]
On the anti-slavery side of the ledger, Washington signed a reenactment of the Northwest Ordinance in 1789, which had freed all slaves brought after 1787 into a vast expanse of federal territory north of the Ohio River, except for slaves escaping from slave states.[289][290] That 1787 law lapsed when the new U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789.