This measure granted slaveowners sweeping new powers to capture and reclaim escaped slaves. It also required people in the North to assist the slaveowners in retrieving their property. Many Northerners resented the Fugitive Slave Act. They were able to ignore slavery when it was confined to the South, but not when they saw black peoplebeing tracked down like animals and carried off in chains within their own cities. Some people simply disobeyed the act. Others became active in helping escaped slaves hide or reach Canada, where slavery was not allowed. The Fugitive Slave Act ended up increasing the antislavery and anti-Southern feelings of many people in the North.
The Fugitive Slave Act had a strong effect on a young writer named Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896). The daughter of prominent religious leader Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1832, she moved with her family to Cincinnati, a city in the southern part of Ohio just across the Ohio River from the slave-holding state of Kentucky. Stowe occasionally encountered fugitive slaves while living in Cincinnati. She also read American Slavery as It Is by abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld (1803–1895), a collection of articles about slavery and advertisements for slaves from Southern newspapers.
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