which has suddenly taken possession of him, he hastens away to hide and fly, fly and hide, until he reaches a land where slave-hounds enter not, and panting fugitives find freedom.  Wendell Phillips tells of an old woman of seventy who asked his advice about flying, though originally free, and fearful only of being caught up by mistake.  The distress everywhere was awful, the excitement indescribable.  From Boston alone in the brief space of three weeks after the rescue of Shadrach, nearly a hundred of these panic stricken creatures had fled.  The whole number escaping into Canada Charles Sumner placed as high as six thousand souls.  But in addition to this large band of fugitives, others emigrated to the interior of New England away from the seaboard centers of trade and commerce where the men-hunters abounded.

The excitement and the perils of this period were not confined to the colored people.  Their white friends shared both with them.  We are indebted to Mr. Phillips for the following graphic account of these excitements and perils in Boston in March, 1851.  He has been describing the situation in the city, in respect of the execution of the infamous law, to Elizabeth Pease, and goes on thus:  “I need not enlarge on this; but the long evening sessions—­debates about secret escapes—­plans to evade where we can’t resist—­the door watched that no spy may enter—­the whispering consultations of the morning—­some putting property out of their hands, planning to incur penalties, and planning also that, in case of conviction, the Government may get nothing from them—­the doing, and answering no questions—­intimates forbearing to ask the knowledge which it may be dangerous to have—­all remind one of those foreign scenes which have hitherto been known to us, transatlantic republicans, only in books.”

On the passage of the Black Bill, as the Abolitionists stigmatised the law, it was not believed that the moral sentiment of Boston would execute it, so horrified did the community seem.  But it was soon apparent to the venerable Josiah Quincy that “The Boston of 1851 is not the Boston of 1775.  Boston,” the sage goes on to remark, “has now become a mere shop—­a place for buying and selling goods; and, I suppose, also of buying and selling men.”  The great idol of her shopkeepers, Daniel Webster, having striven mightily for the enactment of the hateful bill while Senator of the United States, had gone into Millard Fillmore’s Cabinet, to labor yet more mightily for its enforcement.  The rescue of Shadrach, which Mr. Secretary of State characterized “as a case of treason,” set him to thundering for the Union as it was, and against the “fanatics,” who were stirring up the people of the free States to resist the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law.  But he was no longer “the God-like” Webster, for he appeared to the editor of the Liberator as “an ordinary-looking, poor, decrepit old man, whose limbs could scarce support him; lank with