agitators, looked upon Clay’s settlement as the last word.  “The people, especially the business men of the country,” says Elson, “were utterly weary of the agitation and they gave their suffrages to the party that promised them rest.”  The Free Soil party, condemning slavery as “a sin against God and a crime against man,” and advocating freedom for the territories, failed to carry a single state.  In fact it polled fewer votes than it had four years earlier—­156,000 as against nearly 3,000,000, the combined vote of the Whigs and Democrats.  It is not surprising, therefore, that President Pierce, surrounded in his cabinet by strong Southern sympathizers, could promise to put an end to slavery agitation and to crush the abolition movement in the bud.

=Anti-slavery Agitation Continued.=—­The promise was more difficult to fulfill than to utter.  In fact, the vigorous execution of one measure included in the Compromise—­the fugitive slave law—­only made matters worse.  Designed as security for the planters, it proved a powerful instrument in their undoing.  Slavery five hundred miles away on a Louisiana plantation was so remote from the North that only the strongest imagination could maintain a constant rage against it.  “Slave catching,” “man hunting” by federal officers on the streets of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, or Milwaukee and in the hamlets and villages of the wide-stretching farm lands of the North was another matter.  It brought the most odious aspects of slavery home to thousands of men and women who would otherwise have been indifferent to the system.  Law-abiding business men, mechanics, farmers, and women, when they saw peaceful negroes, who had resided in their neighborhoods perhaps for years, torn away by federal officers and carried back to bondage, were transformed into enemies of the law.  They helped slaves to escape; they snatched them away from officers who had captured them; they broke open jails and carried fugitives off to Canada.

Assistance to runaway slaves, always more or less common in the North, was by this time organized into a system.  Regular routes, known as “underground railways,” were laid out across the free states into Canada, and trusted friends of freedom maintained “underground stations” where fugitives were concealed in the daytime between their long night journeys.  Funds were raised and secret agents sent into the South to help negroes to flee.  One negro woman, Harriet Tubman, “the Moses of her people,” with headquarters at Philadelphia, is accredited with nineteen invasions into slave territory and the emancipation of three hundred negroes.  Those who worked at this business were in constant peril.  One underground operator, Calvin Fairbank, spent nearly twenty years in prison for aiding fugitives from justice.  Yet perils and prisons did not stay those determined men and women who, in obedience to their consciences, set themselves to this lawless work.

[Illustration:  HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]