William Lloyd Garrison began the publication of _The Liberator_ in
1831. The American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in 1833 and soon
thereafter the Underground Railroad commenced its operations. Under
the influence of these forces, not only was the execution of the law
with reference to fugitive slaves in many of the Northern States
greatly hindered but the slaves enticed or escaping from their masters
became much more numerous. The irritating effects of these conditions
upon Southern slaveholders were intensified by the suggestion that the
law was fairly enforced as long as there were slaves in the so-called
free states. In time, however, the Legislatures of many of the
Northern States adopted state laws which were undoubtedly designed to
defeat the execution of the Federal statute, and thus was added the
sanction of states through their law-making bodies to the illegal
attitude and acts of their citizens. This political action of these
states not only aroused the indignation of slaveholders, but enlisted
in their behalf the sympathies of their non-slaveholding fellow
citizens. The attitude of the Abolitionists and the action of the
Northern States above referred to were regarded by the people of
Virginia as a violation of the constitutional rights of their state,
as well as a wanton injury to the property interests of her
slaveholding citizens. The Abolitionists, by every form of suggestion
and appeal, incited and assisted slaves to desert their masters, while
the Underground Railroad provided increasing facilities for
accomplishing the result.
Professor A. B. Hart, of Harvard University, says:
"The Underground Railroad was not a route but a network; not an
organization, but a conspiracy of thousands of people banded
together for the deliberate purpose of depriving their Southern
neighbors of their property and of defying the Fugitive Slave Laws
of the United States."[293]
With such a system in active operation, it only became necessary, in
order to invest the whole movement with the dignity of state
usurpation and wrong, for states to enact the so-called Personal
Liberty Laws.
-----
Footnote 289:
Constitution of the United States, Article IV, Sub-section 2.
Footnote 290:
_Plymouth Colony Records_, IX, p. 5, and _Fugitive Slaves_, Boston,
1891, McDougall, p. 7.
Footnote 291:
_History of the Ordinance of 1787_, American Antiquarian Society,
new series, Vol. V, p. 315.
Footnote 292:
_Idem_, p. 335.
Footnote 293:
_Slavery and Abolition_, Hart, p. 228.