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This chapter examines how the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law politicized the fugitive slave issue on a national scale. With the sectional conflict increasing, and the fugitive slave issue at the heart of compromises designed to resolve it, local newspapers began covering fugitive slave cases extensively, creating a new body of evidence just as the local Underground Railroad was becoming more secretive due to legal liabilities. Fugitive slave cases that previously would have only received limited local attention now might be publicized across the North and South. In Congress, Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator James Cooper gave important speeches on the Compromise. In southern Pennsylvania, this process as well as the 1840s legal struggle over fugitive slaves culminated in the Christiana riot and the resulting treason trials of William Parker and Christian Hanway, which helped unseat a sitting governor and almost caused sectional rupture.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman who disliked confrontations, who rode over unpleasantness with optimistic goodwill and turned aside anger with humor, found herself, as public opinion brewed over the Fugitive Slave Law, consumed with a rage unlike anything she had ever experienced. Her intense feelings were the more oppressive for having no outlet. Men made the laws and shaped the public opinion of the land, and women who found themselves morally repelled by their work had little recourse. Women engaged in rather extraordinary acts of civil disobedience, provoked by laws that they themselves had had no part in making. As the temperance crusade moved from the podium to the ballot box with the passage of the first legal constraint on the liquor trade, the “Maine Law” of 1851, women who had been active in temperance societies keenly felt their disfranchisement.

This chapter focuses on Thomas L. Kane's work in relation to the Fugitive Slave Law. It explains that Kane resigned as judicial clerk upon the passage of the law because it required him as a U.S. commissioner to perform a central role in capturing and extraditing fugitive slaves. It discusses the conflict Kane's resignation caused between him and his father, John Kane, and suggests that this conflict illustrates the divide within the northern Democratic Party over slavery.

This chapter describes the open and successful defiance of the Oberlinites towards federal authority and the Fugitive Slave Law, and their manipulation of the rescue episode into a triumphant propaganda. In Ohio and across the North, the flagging Republican Party embraced the Oberlin Rescuers, and in the process, the resulting injection of radicalism helped rescue the party from its drift toward conservatism and directed it down the path that would ultimately lead to a national policy of emancipation.

There was no straight line from a racist society to one that supported full equality, and there was no guarantee that a right established one year could not be changed the next. That rang true in the United States and particularly in New England following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This chapter analyzes the four most important fugitive slave cases of the region: William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns. The result of those cases—two successful, two not—was a change in New England. Antislavery became socially acceptable, and there was an increased willingness among white New Englanders to accept the equal rights of African Americans. But racism hadn't died. What was different were attitudes about New England and about the slave South. In the short term black New Englanders benefited, but there were limits to progress.

Chapter Two examines Clark’s decision to embrace emigration as a response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and the intractability of racism in America. The chapter documents his plans to participate in a local American Colonization Society scheme called “Ohio in Africa.” Although he took steps to leave, he never sailed for the colony. He eventually abandoned his plans to emigrate, determined to stay and fight for African Americans’ rights in the United States.

Chapter forty-eight examines Hodge’s politics and his tripartite commitment to God’s sovereignty, property rights and the need for religion to be tied to political action for the good of the nation. Through an examination of Hodge’s Repertory review of Moses Stuart’s Conscience and the Constitution, one finds that Hodge had a firm commitment to believing that humanity’s common moral sense would bind the nation together. This belief was unsettled by the Civil War. Hodge also shifted political party allegiances during this life from the Whig party to the Republican party, but he always considered himself a Federalist at heart.

Chapter forty-nine examines Hodge’s early engagement in the events surround the beginning of the Civil War. Hodge was strongly pro-Union, and wrote early about the need to keep the Union intact. In this effort, he wrote one of his most famous and widely read Repertory articles: “The State of the Country.” Once it became clear that Lincoln’s election would lead to succession, Hodge attempted to keep Southern and Northern Old School Presbyterians united. This effort also failed as James Thornwell and Benjamin Morgan Palmer led Southern Old School Presbyterians to form their own denomination. Hodge had little sympathy for the South, who he saw unlawfully seceding as it turned its back on the Constitution, but he worked hard to attempt to avoid the breakup of the Union.

This chapter takes up the dispute that occurred in 1841 between Emerson and Margaret Fuller—a falling-out precipitated by Emerson’s affective coldness—as a fulcrum in Emerson’s evolution toward activist politics. Examining Emerson’s writing on friendship and his relationship with Fuller, in particular in the essay “Friendship” (1841) and the coauthored book Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), the chapter contends that especially after Fuller’s death (an event that coincided with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law), Emerson’s mulling of his friend’s charge that his own chilly disposition had prevented him from enjoining the “full communion” that Fuller and other friends had proffered provided him the template for traversing his own formerly aloof political engagement.

This chapter considers different views about the workings and political impact of the Underground Railroad (UGRR). Before the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, organizations such as the Aiding and Abetting Society had been sending whites and blacks into the South disguised as peddlers, colporteurs, and teachers to encourage slaves to escape. The “unnamed white man” was not just a figment of the imagination of those who felt themselves hemmed in and under siege; experience suggested he was real.

The first of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the life, activism, and pioneering efforts of abolitionist and black woman lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Exploring her migrations above and below the Canadian border, the authors highlight her sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora, this chapter illustrates the how gender, place, race, and power collided in the lives of black people before and after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Prior to the Civil War, Kentucky's enslaved population was concentrated in the state's prime agricultural counties. In 1790, Kentucky had 11,830 slaves and by 1860, the state's enslaved population had increased to 225,483 or 19.5 percent of the total population. Large Bluegrass farms produced tobacco and hemp as commercial cash crops often with slave labor. Slave dealers collected surplus slaves and sold them to buyers who transported them into the South for resale to sugar cane and cotton plantations. Thousands of slaves fled their owners’ control and tried to reach Canada by way of the northern states. The combination of routes, modes of movement, individuals who actively provided assistance and places where slaves could be hidden were collectively referred to as the Underground Railroad. The Maysville Road corridor was an especially active slave escape route.

This chapter discusses the abolition of slavery in Illinois after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 marked the beginning of the end of the struggle for emancipation. Many of the settlers of southern Illinois had come from the slave belt. These men brought with them their outlooks and habits of life, and southern Illinois, later known as “Egypt,” became a stronghold of pro-slavery sentiment. With the opening of the Erie Canal, New Englanders, New Yorkers, and immigrants direct from Europe settled in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. These pioneers, too, “packed their beliefs in their traveling bags.” It has been contended by some that the construction of the Erie Canal was more influential in freeing the Southern slaves than were such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison. This chapter looks at some of the leading Illinois abolitionists, including Owen Lovejoy, Ichabod Codding, Edward Beecher, Zebina Eastman, Hooper Warren, Benjamin Lundy, and Lyman Trumbull. It also considers the Fugitive Slave Law and the reaction of Chicagoans to it.