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act was so draconian that it made it relatively easy for any white southerner to come north and kidnap any black person, whether a former slave of his or a free-born citizen of a northern state, and carry him or her off into slavery. Further, it mandated, under threat of severe criminal penalty in case of refusal, the use of northern state and local facilities, such as jails, and the active cooperation of northern state officials, sheriffs, and even common citizens. The latter might be drafted into a posse to hunt down alleged runaways. Thus, northerners, some of whom were opposed to slavery, were compelled not only to acquiesce but actively to participate in the enforcement of a law they held to be positively immoral. No amount of abolitionist speeches, sermons, or pamphlets could have created as many converts to abolitionism as did the Fugitive Slave Act.
    The Fugitive Slave Act was a slap in the face of state rights. Nothing else the federal government had ever done or proposed doing throughout all of the nation’s history up to that time had so thoroughly trampled on the rights and sovereignty of the individual states. This was especially ironic in view of the fact that less than twenty years later some white southerners would already be claiming that their cause had been that of state rights. The history of the 1850s does not bear that out. Southern political leaders during that decade, as during the preceding decades, championed either the cause of state rights or that of federal authority according to whichever seemed most likely to protect the institution of slavery. Since southerners had generally controlled the federal government during that era, they had more often than not been the active enemies of state rights.
    The Fugitive Slave Act soon sparked resistance. Some abolitionists already maintained a network of secret routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, aimed at aiding runaway slaves in making their way through the northern states to ultimate freedom in Canada. Perhaps one hundred thousand slaves had already taken the route to freedom, most of them to Canada, and the Underground Railroad came to carry its peak traffic in the 1850s, as the Fugitive Slave Act drove more northerners to take the step of outright civil disobedience by aiding the slaves in their escape.
    Animosity toward the Fugitive Slave Act and its high-handed enforcement in the North led in 1851 to violence in the town of Christiana, Pennsylvania. On September 11 of that year, a group of escaped slaves shot and killed a slaveholder who was leading a posse with the intent of apprehending one of them. A celebrated trial followed in which Pennsylvania authorities, compelled by law to cooperate in a process they hated, allowed two of the accused to escape and otherwise did their best to assure a just, if not a legal, outcome. Southerners took notice and angrily determined to see the Fugitive Slave Act enforced in the North.
    They got their chance for a high-profile case two years later. In 1853 Virginia slave Anthony Burns escaped and managed to board a ship at Richmond and sail to Boston. His master got wind of his whereabouts and invoked the Fugitive Slave Act to secure his return. Boston contained more abolitionists than any other major city in America, though even there they were a minority. Some of them determined to free Burns and launched a mob assault on the jail where he was being held, killing a deputy U.S. marshal but failing in their purpose. President Franklin Pierce, who had been elected in 1852 as a “northern man of southern principles,” determined to make an example of this case and teach northerners a lesson about the supremacy of law and the return of fugitive slaves. Pierce sent in large numbers of federal troops to line the streets leading down to the docks. More soldiers formed a moving square around Burns as they marched him through Boston in chains and put him aboard a ship bound for Virginia. Bostonians