sier and
easier. Once across the border a runaway was sure to find many friends
and few enemies. Openly, or, if this was required, by stealth, he was
passed quickly along to the Canada line. Between 1830 and 1860 over
30,000 slaves are estimated to have taken refuge in Canada. By 1850,
probably no less than 20,000 had found homes in the free States. The new
law moved many of these across into the British dominions. It was hence
increasingly difficult for the slave-owner to recover stray property.
All possible legal obstructions were placed in his way, and when these
failed he was likely still to be opposed by a mob which might prove too
powerful for the marshal and any posse which he could gather.

[Illustration: Three angry men looking out a window at crowd of citizens
and soldiers in large plaza.]
The Rendition of Anthony Burns in Boston.

In Boston, when a slave named Shadrach was arrested, his friends made a
sudden dash, rescued him from the officers and freed him. With Simms the
same was attempted, but in vain. The removal of Anthony Burns from that
city in 1855 was possible only by escorting him down State Street to the
revenue cutter in waiting, inside a dense hollow square of United States
artillerymen and marines, with the whole city's militia under arms and
at hand. Business houses as well as residences were closed and draped in
mourning. It was an indignity which Massachusetts never forgot. At
Alton, Ill., slave-hunters seized a respectable colored woman, long
resident there, who fully believed herself free. She was surrounded by
an infuriated company of citizens, and would have been wrenched from her
captors' clutch had not they, in their terror, offered to sell her back
into freedom. The needed $1,200 was raised in a few minutes, and the
agonized creature restored to her family. Judge Davis, whom the evidence
had compelled to deliver the woman, on rendering the sentence resigned
his commission, declaring: "The law gives you your victim. Thank it and
not me, and may God have mercy on your sinful souls."

CHAPTER V.

THE FIGHT FOR KANSAS

[1850-1854]

The measures of 1850 proved anything but the "finality" upon slavery
discussion which both parties, the Whigs as loudly as the Democrats,
promised and insisted that they should be. Elated by its victory in
1850, and also by that of 1852, when the anti-slavery sentiment of
northern Whigs drove so many of their old southern allies to vote for
Pier