Page:Sketchesinhistory00pett.pdf/54

48 second “accidental chief magistrate,” who signed the bill, and then enforced it with all the influence and patronage he could command. I have now before me his proclamation, calling on the army and navy to rally to the aid of the blood-hounds in running down a poor man in Boston, by the name of “Shadrach.”

Shadrach had escaped from the “fiery furnace” of slavery. The U.S. Marshal seized him, and was binding him hand and foot for the purpose of “pitching him in” again, but the cords that bound him, somehow came apart, and Shadrach walked away, and this time there was not even the smell of the aforesaid fire on his garments. This put new energy into Mil—rd, he sent a special message to Congress, then in session, urging them to pass more stringent laws, so that he could compel his “subjects” to fall down and worship the image that he had set up. Shadrach was re-captured, taken in a man-of-war to Richmond, and sold at auction, his purchaser giving bail that he should be sent south of Virginia. In 1864 I saw a notice in the papers that he had returned to Boston. The fire of slavery had not consumed him? but the fire on Fort Sumter had severed the cords that bound him.

The story of “the Shadrach case in Boston” made the city of Syracuse a hot-bed of abolitionism. The people met in convention, denounced the law and the men who enacted it, and resolved that no slave should be carried out of Syracuse. The slaveholders, encouraged by the course pursued by the President and the leading members of Congress of all parties, became more and more insolent, and cracked their slave whips in plantation style. One of them threatened on the floor of Congress, that whenever another anti-slavery convention should be held in Syracuse a fugitive should be arrested and sent back to slavery from that city. The Empire State