Even in the free states, attitudes toward slavery were complicated. A raft of economic, social, and religious dynamics had resulted in the abolition or prohibition of slavery, but that did not automatically mean that the entire population favored racial equality or abolition in general. (When Northern states began abolishing slavery after the American Revolution, many slaveholders opted to sell their chattel to buyers in the South rather than manumit them.) At the same time, the Fugitive Slave Act replaced the more complicated questions about the institution with a single, less complicated one: Were Northerners prepared to watch their neighbors, many of whom had lived in their communities for years, be violently removed from their homes or grabbed off the streets? For many, the answer was no.
Attempted enforcement of the law met with immediate resistance. In 1851, an armed mob surrounded a group of agents led by a slaveholder, Edward Gorsuch, in Christiana, Pennsylvania, who were attempting to return four fugitives to his farm, in Maryland; Gorsuch was shot and killed. The four, along with others who participated in the standoff, escaped, and some reached Canada with the assistance of Frederick Douglass. In Syracuse, New York, Oberlin, Ohio, and other cities, crowds swarmed jails where captured fugitives were held in other successful efforts to free them, at the risk of their own prosecution. (In 1854, fifty thousand people filled the streets of Boston, a center of abolitionist resistance, to protest against returning Anthony Burns, a Black man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia, to that state. (When that effort failed, a group privately purchased Burns’s freedom and facilitated his return to Massachusetts.)
The significance of this history is twofold. The Fugitive Slave Act was rhetorically useful for a certain element of the political class, but for most people it took an issue that they may have felt ambivalent about—or hadn’t much thought about at all—and gave them a direct, visceral reason to feel very strongly about it. Slavery might have been an abstract national concern, but the fate of a neighbor, whom people may have depended upon as a part of their community, was very much a personal one. Something akin to that reaction is occurring in communities across the U.S. now, as social-media feeds fill with images of children being harassed by ICE agents as they leave school and of a five-year-old boy being detained, and of adults being shoved to the ground and pepper-sprayed or pulled from their cars after agents smash the windows. The Fugitive Slave Act is remembered by historians for its ironic effect: designed as a means of cooling the simmering regional tensions over slavery, the law effectively made it the most contentious issue facing the nation. It pushed Americans toward the realization that the nation was bound in what William Seward later termed an “irrepressible conflict.”