Efforts to catch and return fugitive slaves inflam Essays

Efforts to catch and return fugitive slaves inflamed feelings in both the Nor th and the South. In 1854, a Bo ston mob, aroused by antislavery speeches, broke into a courthouse killed a guard in an abortive effort to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Determined to prove that the law could be enforced 'even in Boston', President Franklin Pierce sent a detachment of federal troops to escort Burns to the harbor, where a ship carried him back to slavery. As five platoons of troops marched with the Burns to the ship, some fifty thousand people lined the streets. As the procession passed, one Bostonian hung from his window a black coffin bearing the words 'THE FUNERAL OF LIBERTY'. Another draped an American flag upside down as a symbol that 'my country is eternally disgraced by this day's proceedings.'...A Boston committee later successfully purchased Burns's freedom, but other fugitives had worse fates. Margaret Garner, about to be captured and sent back to Kentucky as a sl ave, slit her daughter's throat and tried to kill her other children rather than witness their return to slavery. After the American Revolution, the North and South developed different views of life. The North developed busy cities, embraced technology and industry, and built factories run by paid workers. The South had remained an agricultural society. The Southern economy and way of life was based on the cotton crop. The South relied on the work of enslaved African Americans to do the work out in the fields. When it came to Americas expansion you had to decide if the new territories were going to be slave or free states. Many northerners wanted to end slavery all together, but the south relied on them, and wanted to keep them. The Southern slave owners could now go up north and get the escaped slaves back from the North. It also allowed for them to take some free African Americans, and save they were escaped. Free African Americans had to worry about people from the south coming up, and claiming that they were escaped slaves, even if they had earned their freedom. The northern whites could be arrested for helping the escaped African Americans or the ones who were said to be escaped, but actually free, The fugitive slaves in the north now were being returned to the plantations in the south that they had escaped from. The fugitive slave Act allowed for people to lie about people being slaves so that they could be paid the reward for finding them. The free African Americans were being forced back into slavery which was not very fair to them. It made tension between the north and the South, because the North did not like that the free African Americans could be taken from the free states, and forced back into slavery.