ABSTRACT
Although Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Stephen Douglas, and other national political leaders believed that the Compromise of 1850 would calm sectional tensions, the compromise only inflamed southern and northern activists. Northern abolitionists were incensed by the Fugitive Slave Law, especially since the legislation denied runaways the right to a trial by jury and permitted their return to slavery merely on the word of a slaveholder. Worst of all perhaps was a stipulation in the law that denied the accused fugitive the right to a proper defense. Antislavery northerners angrily proclaimed that they were forced to become complicit in supporting an institution they despised. Antislavery passions in the North, sentiments never sustained by a large majority of northerners, were heightened by a novel published in 1852 by a previously little-known New England woman writer.
