Calhoun, old and ill, his once-powerful voice broken by the throat cancer that would soon kill him, sat grim and silent as another senator read his words: "How can the Union be saved? There is but one way by which it can with any certainty; and that is, by a full and final settlement, on the principle of justice, of all the questions at issue between the two sections [North and South]. The South asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the Constitution; and no concession or surrender to make.

Within the northern United States, a number of fights and riots occurred when slave catchers tried to return blacks to their masters. For example, in 1854 in Boston, slave catchers seized Anthony Burns, an escaped slave. It took marines, cavalry and artillery to hold back the thousands of people who tried to keep Burns from being returned to his Southern master. The attempt to free him failed. Nevertheless, a few months after his return to the South, Northern abolitionists purchased Anthony Burns from his master and sent him to Canada.

Some abolitionists wanted to do more than campaign for laws ending slavery. Some brave people helped slaves escape to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Neither underground nor a railroad, the Underground Railroad was actually an aboveground series of escape routes from the South to the North. On these routes, runaway slaves traveled on foot. They also took wagons, boats, and trains.

Responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin depended on geography. In the North, common people and literary giants alike shed tears and sang its praises. The poet John Greenleaf Whitier sent "ten thousand thanks for thy immortal book," and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow judged it "one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history." What Northerners accepted as truth, Southerners denounced as slander. Virginian George F.

Escapees often made it out on their own – [Fredrick] Douglass borrowed a pass from a free black seaman – but many were aided by the Underground Railroad, which grew into a vast system to conceal runaways and spirit them to freedom, often over the Canadian border. Levi Coffin, a North Carolina Quaker who moved to Cincinnati and did help many fugitives, was the reputed president. Actually, there seems to have been more spontaneity than system about the matter, and blacks contributed more than was credited in the legend.

Religious beliefs and practices could both offer comfort and inspire action. By the mid-1880s, hundreds were fleeing plantations each year to freedom in the North and in Mexico. Between 1830 and 1860, a network of abolitionists created the Underground Railroad that helped enslaved African Americans escape by conducting them to safe houses where they could hide on their way to free territories.

[Harriet Tubman’s] rebellious temperament, combined with this odd malady, set her apart from others in her youth, and she absorbed a brand of millennial slave Christianity. Marriage to a free black, John Tubman, further aroused her questioning about slavery and freedom, but the difficulty of escape and concern for her parents and husband held her back until 1849, when the death of her owner led her to fear being sold into the deep South. Harriet headed north, traveling by night, and with help from some sympathetic whites made her way to Pennsylvania.

For black people it was no compromise. It was a disaster. What did it matter if the slave sales were forbidden in the District of Columbia? White families living there could still keep slaves. And Southern officeholders could bring slaves to serve them in the capital city of a supposedly free, democratic nation. But the chief threat for black people came from passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, one part of the Compromise of 1850...Finally, the law said that those who knew of escaped slaves and did not report what they knew could be fined and even jailed.

From 1840 on, therefore, abolitionism moved in many channels and spoke with many different voices. The Garrisonians remained influential, with their uncompromising moral stance. Others operated in more moderate ways, arguing that abolition could be accomplished only as the result of a long, patient, peaceful struggle – “immediate abolition gradually accomplished,” as they called it. At first, such moderates depended on “moral suasion.” They would appeal to the conscience of the slaveholders and convince them that their institution was sinful.

Citing the new Fugitive Slave Law, they [southern slave-catchers] asked federal marshals to seize one Jerry McHenry, who they cliamed was an escaped slave. People in Syracuse were shocked to see someone in chains marched through ths streets to the federal courthouse. An angry crowd of more than 2,000 gathered. Led by abolitionist ministers, the crowd mobbed the courthouse and battered down the door. McHenry was taken from the marshals and spirited away by members of the Underground Railroad.