As “The Present Crisis” came after the Mexican War, so after the new Fugitive Slave Law appeared Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).  “When despairing Hungarian fugitives make their way, against all the search-warrants and authorities of their lawful governments, to America, press and political cabinet ring with applause and welcome.  When despairing African fugitives do the same thing—­it is—­what is it?” asked Harriet Beecher Stowe; and in her remarkable book she proceeded to show the injustice of the national position. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has frequently been termed a piece of propaganda that gave an overdrawn picture of Southern conditions.  The author, however, had abundant proof for her incidents, and she was quite aware of the fact that the problem of the Negro, North as well as South, transcended the question of slavery.  Said St. Clair to Ophelia:  “If we emancipate, are you willing to educate?  How many families of your town would take in a Negro man or woman, teach them, bear with them, and seek to make them Christians?  How many merchants would take Adolph, if I wanted to make him a clerk; or mechanics, if I wanted to teach him a trade?  If I wanted to put Jane and Rosa to school, how many schools are there in the Northern states that would take them in?...  We are in a bad position.  We are the more obvious oppressors of the Negro; but the unchristian prejudice of the North is an oppressor almost equally severe.”

Meanwhile the thrilling work of the Underground Railroad was answered by a practical reopening of the slave-trade.  From 1820 to 1840, as the result of the repressive measure of 1819, the traffic had declined; between 1850 and 1860, however, it was greatly revived, and Southern conventions resolved that all laws, state or Federal, prohibiting the slave-trade, should be repealed.  The traffic became more and more open and defiant until, as Stephen A. Douglas computed, as many as 15,000 slaves were brought into the country in 1859.  It was not until the Lincoln government in 1862 hanged the first trader who ever suffered the extreme penalty of the law, and made with Great Britain a treaty embodying the principle of international right of search, that the trade was effectually checked.  By the end of the war it was entirely suppressed, though as late as 1866 a squadron of ships patrolled the slave coast.

The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise and providing for “squatter sovereignty” in the territories in question, outraged the North and led immediately to the forming of the Republican party.  It was not long before public sentiment began to make itself felt, and the first demonstration took place in Boston.  Anthony Burns was a slave who escaped from Virginia and made his way to Boston, where he was at work in the winter of 1853-4.  He was discovered by a United States marshal who presented a writ for his arrest just at the time of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in May, 1854.  Public