Efforts to catch and return fugitive slaves inflamed feelings in both the North and the South.  In 1854, a Boston mob, aroused by antislavery speeches, broke into a courthouse killed a guard in an abortive effort to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Determined to prove that the law could be enforced 'even in Boston', President Franklin Pierce sent a detachment of federal troops to escort Burns to the harbor, where a ship carried him back to slavery. As five platoons of troops marched with the Burns to the ship, some fifty thousand people lined the streets.

People who 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 runaways laves legal assistance.  Amos A. Lawrence, a northern Democrat, voiced a common sentiments:  "We have submitted to slavery long enough, and must not stand it any longer...I am done catching negroes for the South."

In 1987 writer Toni Morrison published her award-winning Beloved. The novel had historical origins. In 1855, a slave family - Robert Garner, his twenty-two year old wife Margaret, their four children and his parents fled Kentucky. Archibald Gaines, Margaret's owner, tracked them to a cabin in Ohio. Thinking that all was lost and that her children would be returned to slavery, Margaret seized a butcher knife and cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter. She was turning on her other children when slave catchers burst in and captured her. Garner's child murder electrified the nation.

In 1850, only three years after its founding, Desert became annexed to the United States as Utah Territory.  But what focused the Nation’s attention on the Latter-Day Saints was the announcement by Brigham Young in 1852 that many Mormons practiced polygamy.  Although only one Mormon man in five had more than one wife (Young had twenty-three), Young’s public statement caused an outcry that forced the government to establish its authority in Utah.  In 1857, twenty-five hundred U.S.

Others actively resisted [the Fugitive Slave Act]. Theodore Parker, the clergyman and abolitionist, denounced the law as "a hateful statute of kidnappers" and headed a Boston vigilance committee that openly violated it. In February 1851, an angry crowd in Boston overpowered federal marshals and snatched away a runaway named Shadrach from a courtroom, put him on the Underground Railroad, and whisked him away off to Montréal Canada.

The publication in 1857 of Hinton R. Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South, which called upon nonslaveholders to abolish slavery in their own interest, revealed the persistence of a degree of white opposition to slavery. On balance, however, slavery did not create profound and lasting divisions between the South's slaveholders and nonslaveholders. Although antagonism to slavery flourished in parts of Virginia up to 1860, proposals for emancipation dropped from the state's political agenda after 1832.

Despite promising signs that the Compromise of 1850 would be accepted, differences over slavery did not end.  In 1851 an escaped salve named Shadrach was arrested in Boston.  He was rescued by a group of fellow blacks.  "The rescue of Shadrach" wrote antislavery supporter Wendell Phillips, "has set the whole public afire."  A Maryland slave owner, reclaiming two of his runaway slaves in Pennsylvania, was killed by a mob.  In New York, a well known black named James Hamlet was captured.  A Maryland woman claimed that he was a runaway.  Hamlet was taken di

The argument reached its fullest development in the writings of George Fitzhugh, a Virginia farmer-lawyer whose newspaper articles were gathered into two books published in 1854 and 1857, Sociology for the South and Cannibals All. Free-labor capitalism, said Fitzhugh, was a war of each against all, a competition in which the strong exploited and starved the weak. Slavery, by contrast, was a paternal institution that guaranteed protection of the workers.

A financial panic in the fall of 1857 brought on what turned out to be a short-lived but intense depression. Causes of the panic stemmed partly from the international economy and partly from domestic overexpansion…This speculative house of cards came crashing down in September 1857. The failure of one banking house sent a wave of panic through the financial community. Banks suspended specie payments, businesses failed, railroads went bankrupt, construction halted, factories shut down.

The case of Dred Scott v. Sandford reached the Supreme Court in March 1857. By a vote of seven to two, the Court ruled that black people - either free or enslaved - were not citizens of the United States and, therefore did not have the right to sue in a federal court. Dred Scott thus would have to remain enslaved, subject to the laws of the state of Missouri...Southerners rejoiced at the Dred Scott decision, which opened all territories to slavery. The North was outraged at the decision. The Republican party had dedicated itself to preventing the extension of slavery.