So savage was this 'Man-stealing Law' [Fugitive Slave Act] that it touched off an explosive chain reaction in the North.  Many Shocked moderates, hitherto passive, were driven into the swelling ranks of the antislaveryites.  When a runaway slave from Virginia was captured in Boston in 1854, he had to be removed from the city under heavy federal guard through streets lined with sullen Yankees and shadowed by black-draped buildings festooned with flags flying upside dow.  One prominent Bostonian who witnessed this grim spectacle wrote that 'we went to bed one night old-fashio

The fugitive Slave Law, the part of the Compromise of 1850 that provided for the return of escaped slaves, proved to be almost universally hated in the North.  1851, for example, a group of southern slave-catchers, hired to track down escaped slaves, arrived in Syracuse, New York.  Citing the new law, they asked federal marshals to seize Jerry McHenry, who they claimed was an escaped slave.  People in Syracuse were shocked to see a man in chains marched through the streets to the federal courthouse.  Led by abolitionist  ministers, a crowd of more than 2,000 mobbe

These developments put Senator Stephen A. Douglas in a difficult position. He was a Democrat. (But he was clearly no friend of the president's. Indeed he often used his skills as an orator to express his open contempt for Buchanan.) The president had made the matter a party issue. On the other hand, Douglas sincerely believed in popular sovereignty. And it was obvious that a majority of the people in Kansas were opposed to the Lecompton constitution and to the opening of the territory to slavery.

Although the Compromise of 1850 was approved, many problems remained.  Abolitionists stated that the Fugitive Slave Law clashed with the Bill of Rights.  Under the Fugitive Slave Law, a free African American could be captured and sold into slavery. 

Shortly after the passage of the act [Fugitive Slave Law], a New Yorker, James Hamlet, was seized, convicted, and even rushed off to slavery in Maryland without even being allowed to communicate with his wife or children.  The New York black community was outraged, and with help from white neighbors it swiftly raised $800 to buy his freedon.  In 1851 Euphemia Williams, was seized, her presumed owner claiming also her six children, all Pennsylvania-born.  A federal judge released Mrs.

In September 1851, a group of black men in the Quaker community of Chistiana, Pennsylvania, shot it out with a Maryland slave owner and his allies who had come to arrest two fugitives. The slave owner was killed and his son severely wounded in the affray.