their
backs upon their homes and hurried precipitately into a strange country.
Fathers with wives and children dependant upon them for their daily
bread, were forced by the dread of being captured and returned to
bondage to abandon their homes and loved ones, sometimes without so much
as a touch of their hands or a tone of their voices in token of
farewell. Perhaps on his way to work in the morning some husband or son
has caught a glimpse among the faces on the street of one face, the
remembrance of which to the day of death, he can never lose, a face he
had known in some far away Southern town or plantation, and with which
are connected in the poor fellow's brain the most frightful sufferings
and associations. Crazed at the sight, with no thought of home, of the
labors which are awaiting him, oblivious of everything but the abject
terror which has suddenly taken possession of him, he hastens away to
hide and fly, fly and hide, until he reaches a land where slave-hounds
enter not, and panting fugitives find freedom. Wendell Phillips tells of
an old woman of seventy who asked his advice about flying, though
originally free, and fearful only of being caught up by mistake. The
distress everywhere was awful, the excitement indescribable. From Boston
alone in the brief space of three weeks after the rescue of Shadrach,
nearly a hundred of these panic stricken creatures had fled. The whole
number escaping into Canada Charles Sumner placed as high as six
thousand souls. But in addition to this large band of fugitives, others
emigrated to the interior of New England away from the seaboard centers
of trade and commerce where the men-hunters abounded.

The excitement and the perils of this period were not confined to the
colored people. Their white friends shared both with them. We are
indebted to Mr. Phillips for the following graphic account of these
excitements and perils in Boston in March, 1851. He has been describing
the situation in the city, in respect of the execution of the infamous
law, to Elizabeth Pease, and goes on thus: "I need not enlarge on this;
but the long evening sessions--debates about secret escapes--plans to
evade where we can't resist--the door watched that no spy may enter--the
whispering consultations of the morning--some putting property out of
their hands, planning to incur penalties, and planning also that, in
case of conviction, the Government may get nothing from them--the doing,
and answering no q