Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/385

Rh have been a possibility for a few years of repose but for the immediate effect of one of the compromise laws. Slave-holders and their agents appeared in the Free States to test the virtue of the new fugitive-slave act. According to trustworthy estimates, there were about twenty thousand escaped slaves living in the Northern country. Many of them had married free colored women, and reared families of children on free soil. The appearance of the “man-hunter” threw them into fearful consternation. Some of them were captured and carried off to the South. In a few cases it turned out that the persons so captured and carried off were not fugitive slaves at all, but freemen, and these had to be released. In several instances the law was executed with a harshness and cruelty which shocked the popular heart. An outcry arose, not only from colored people and anti-slavery men, but from persons who, although they had so far taken little interest in the matter, now felt their human sympathies and their moral sense insulted by the things they witnessed among themselves. The anti-slavery men took advantage of this change of feeling, and meetings were held in Northern cities ringing with denunciations of the fugitive-slave law as an outrage to the dignity of human nature, and as an attempt to carry slavery into the heart of the free North.

As this current of sentiment grew in power, the advocates of the compromise became alarmed lest the efforts at general pacification should be de-