Events moved rapidly in the decade preceding the war.  In 1850 the new Fugitive Slave Law brought discouragement to the hearts of the friends of liberty.  Douglass’s utterances during this period breathed the fiery indignation which he felt when the slave-driver’s whip was heard cracking over the free States, and all citizens were ordered to aid in the enforcement of this inhuman statute when called upon.  This law really defeated its own purpose.  There were thousands of conservative Northern men, who, recognizing the constitutional guarantees of slavery and the difficulty of abolishing it unless the South should take the initiative, were content that it should be preserved intact so long as it remained a local institution.  But when the attempt was made to make the North wash the South’s dirty linen, and transform every man in the Northern States into a slave-catcher, it wrought a revulsion of feeling that aroused widespread sympathy for the slave and strengthened the cause of freedom amazingly.  Thousands of escaped slaves were living in Northern communities.  Some of them had acquired homes, had educated their children, and in some States had become citizens and voters.  Already social pariahs, restricted generally to menial labor, bearing the burdens of poverty and prejudice, they now had thrust before them the spectre of the kidnapper, the slave-catcher with his affidavit, and the United States [Supreme] Court, which was made by this law the subservient tool of tyranny.  This law gave Douglass and the other abolitionists a new text.  It was a set-back to their cause; but they were not entirely disheartened, for they saw in it the desperate expedients by which it was sought to bolster up an institution already doomed by the advancing tide of civilization.

The loss of slaves had become a serious drain upon the border States.  The number of refugees settled in the North was, of course, largely a matter of estimate.  Runaway slaves were not apt to advertise their status, but rather to conceal it, so that most estimates were more likely to be under than over the truth.  Henry Wilson places the number in the free States at twenty thousand.  There were in Boston in 1850, according to a public statement of Theodore Parker, from four to six hundred; and in other New England towns, notably New Bedford, the number was large.  Other estimates place the figures much higher.  Mr. Siebert, in his Underground Railroad, after a careful calculation from the best obtainable data, puts the number of fugitives aided in Ohio alone at forty thousand in the thirty years preceding 1860, and in the same period nine thousand in the city of Philadelphia alone, which was one of the principal stations of the underground railroad and the home of William Still, whose elaborate work on the Underground Railroad gives the details of many thrilling escapes.