West of the Alleghanies are the broad plains of the Mississippi Valley, and in this great region human elements rather than physical characteristics proved influential.Northern Ohio was occupied by settlers from the East, many of whom were anti-slavery.Southern Ohio was populated largely by Quakers and other people from the slave States who abhorred slavery.On the east and south the State bordered on slave territory, and every part of the region was traversed by lines of travel for the slave.In eastern and northern Indiana a favorable attitude prevailed.
Southwestern Indiana, however, and southern Illinois were occupied by those less friendly to the slave, so that in these sections there is little evidence of systematic aid to fugitives.
But with St.Louis, Missouri, as a starting-point, northern Illinois became honeycombed with refuges for patrons of the Underground Railroad.The negro also found friends in all the settled portions of Iowa, and at the outbreak of the Civil War a lively traffic was being developed, extending from Lawrence, Kansas, to Keokuk, Iowa.
There is respectable authority for a variety of opinions as to the requirements of the rendition clause in the Constitution and of the Act of Congress of 1793 to facilitate the return of fugitives from service or labor; but there is no respectable authority in support of the view that neither the spirit nor the letter of the law was violated by the supporters of the Underground Railroad.This was a source of real weakness to anti-slavery leaders in politics.It was always true that only a small minority of their numbers were actual violators of the law, yet such was their relation to the organized anti-slavery movement that responsibility attached to all.The platform of the Liberty party for 1844 declared that the provisions of the Constitution for reclaiming fugitive slaves were dangerous to liberty and ought to be abrogated.It further declared that the members of the party would treat these provisions as void, because they involved an order to commit an immoral act.The platform thus explicitly committed the party to the support of the policy of rendering aid to fugitive slaves.Four years later the platform of the Free-soil party contained no reference whatever to fugitive slaves, but that of 1852 denounced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as repugnant to the Constitution and the spirit of Christianity and denied its binding force on the American people.The Republican platform of 1856 made no reference to the subject.
The Underground Railroad filled an insignificant place in the general plan for emancipation, even in the minds of the directors.It was a lesser task preparatory to the great work.As to the numbers of slaves who gained their freedom by means of it, there is a wide range of opinion.Statements in Congress by Southern members that a hundred thousand had escaped must be regarded as gross exaggerations.In any event the loss was confined chiefly to the border States.Besides, it has been stated with some show of reason that the danger of servile insurrection was diminished by the escape of potential leaders.
>From the standpoint of the great body of anti-slavery men who expected to settle the slavery question by peaceable means, it was a calamity of the first magnitude that, just at the time when conditions were most favorable for transferring the active crusade from the general Government to the separate States, public attention should be directed to the one point at which the conflict was most acute and irrepressible.
Previous to 1850 there had been no general acrimonious debate in Congress on the rendition of fugitive slaves.About half of those who had previously escaped from bondage had not taken the trouble to go as far as Canada, but were living at peace in the Northern States.Few people at the North knew or cared anything about the details of a law that had been on the statute books since 1793.
Members of Congress were duly warned of the dangers involved in any attempt to enforce a more stringent law than the previous act which had proved a dead letter.To those who understood the conditions, the new law also was doomed to failure.So said Senator Butler of South Carolina.An attempt to enforce it would be met by violence.
This prediction came true.The twenty thousand potential victims residing in Northern States were thrown into panic.Some rushed off to Canada; others organized means for protection.A father and son from Baltimore came to a town in Pennsylvania to recover a fugitive.An alarm was sounded; men, mostly colored, rushed to the protection of the one whose liberty was threatened.Two Quakers appeared on the scene and warned the slavehunters to desist and upon their refusal one slave-hunter was instantly killed and the other wounded.The fugitive was conveyed to a place of safety, and to the murderers no punishment was meted out, though the general Government made strenuous efforts to discover and punish them.In New York, though Gerrit Smith and a local clergyman with a few assistants rescued a fugitive from the officers of the law and sent him to Canada, openly proclaiming and justifying the act, no attempt was made to punish the offenders.
After a dozen years of intense and ever-increasing excitement, when other causes of friction between North and South had apparently been removed and good citizens in the two sections were rejoicing at the prospect of an era of peace and harmony, public attention was concentrated upon the one problem of conduct which would not admit of peaceable legal adjustment.
Abolitionists had always been stigmatized as lawbreakers whose aim was the destruction of slavery in utter disregard of the rights of the States.This charge was absolutely false; their settled program involved full recognition of state and municipal control over slavery.Yet after public attention had become fixed upon conduct on the part of the abolitionists which was illegal, it was difficult to escape the implication that their whole course was illegal.This was the tragic significance of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
