Others were immediately upset.  The new fugitive slave law angered many northerners because it brought the evils of slavery right into their midst.  The owners of runaway slaves hired agents, labeled 'kidnappers' in the North, to hunt down fugitives.  In a few dramatic episodes, most notably in Boston, literary and religious intellectuals led mass protests to resist slave hunters' efforts to return alleged fugitives to the South.  When Senator Webster supported the law, New England aboliltionists denounced him as 'indescribably base and wicked.'  Theodore Parker c

Kansas soon provided a test for northern suspicions. Initially Buchanan handled the problem of Kansas well by appointing Robert J. Walker as governor. Although he was from Mississippi. Walker has no desire to foist slavery on the territory against the will of its inhabitants. He was a small man, but a courageous one, patriotic, vigorous, tough-minded, much like Douglas in temper and belief. A former senator and Cabinet member, he had more political stature by far than any previous governor of the territory.

When the lower southern states seceded following the election of Abraham Lincoln, Hayes was willing to "Let them go" (Diary and Letters, vol. 2, p. 4). The attack of Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861, however, infuriated him. On 27 June he was commissioned a major in the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry, preferring to "be killed in the course of it than to live through and after it without taking part in it" (Diary and Letters, vol. 2, p. 17).

In Boston, the day after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, armed forces were needed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.  A battalion of United States artillery, four platoons of marines, and a sheriff's posse were called out to escort a runaway slave from the courthouse to the ship that was waiting to carry him back to the South  Everywhere throughout the North, people once again talked about slavery.  The Fugitive Slave Law became increasingly difficult to enforce.  'Anti-Nebraska' meetings were held, at which Douglas was denounced for reopening the slavery dispute.<

In the Northern strongholds of anitslavey sentiment the new law simply could not be enforced; during the 1850s abolitionists executed a series of dramatic rescues of fugitives and sent them on to Canada and freedom.  Moreover, various Northern states passed personal liberty laws which nullified the fugitive slave act or at least interfered with its enforcement.  This was an assertation of state rights and a form of nullificaton that Southerners scarcely appreciated.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass urged 'forcible resistance.'  A former slave himself, Douglass protested that the Fugitive Slave Act made northerners 'the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.'  People who had supported the Compromise of 1850 were shocked at the government's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.  Several northern states defiantly passed 'personal liberty' laws, which prevented state officials from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act and guaranteed captured runaway slaves legal assistance.  Amos. A.

Instead of settling the slavery controversy, the Dred Scott decision intensified it. Meanwhile, the proslavery forces, having won legalization of slavery in the territories, moved to ensure that it would remain legal when Kansas became a state. The required deft maneuvering, because legitimate antislavery settlers outnumbered proslavery settlers by more than two to one. In 1857 the proslavery legislature (elected by the fraudulent votes of border ruffians two years earlier) called for a constitutional convention at Lecompton to prepare Kansas for statehood.

The slavery issue in Kansas surfaced again in 1857. This issue which had already split the North and the South, now split the Democratic Party. President Buchanan asked Congress to accept a state constitution from Kansas Territory that allowed slavery. But antislavery settlers had boycotted the convention that had formed the document. Senator Douglas - Buchanan's major rival in the Democratic party - was against the Kansas constitution. Douglas said that it did not stand for the views of all of Kansas.

'This filthy encactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write,' Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled in his journal.  He advised neighbors to break it 'on the earliest occasion.'  The occasion soon arose in many places.  Within a month of the law's enactment, claims were filed in New York, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Detroit, and other cities.  Trouble soon followed.  In Detroit only military force stopped the rescue of an alleged fugitive by an outraged mob in October 1850.  There were relatively few such incidents, however,  In t

Then, making matters even worse, was the fraud attempted by the proslavery legislature.  The legislature drew up the Lecompton Constitution.  The document was worded that whether it was voted up or down, slavery in some form was protected.  The Free-Soilers saw through the trick.  They rushed to vote.  As a result, the Lecompton Constitution, with is provisions for slavery, was adopted.  But this let loose a new wave of terror in Kansas and provoked new and violent debate in Congress.