Resistance (Martin, 1997)

The South's demand for an effective fugitive slave law was a major source of sectional tension. Efforts to enforce the law resulted in abuses that repelled many northern moderates. In one instance, a free man named James Hamlet was seized in New York and sent into slavery. Riots directed against the law broke out in many cities. In Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851, a gun battle broke out between abolitionists and slave catchers, and in Wisconsin, an abolitionist editor named Sherman M. Booth freed Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave, from a local jail. In Boston, federal marshals and 22 companies of state troops were needed to prevent a crowd from storming a courthouse to free a fugitive named Anthony Burns.