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.
From thrilling stories of adventure along the underground railways came some of the scenes and themes of the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe,"Uncle Tom's Cabin,"published two years after the Compromise of 1850.Her stirring tale set forth the worst features of slavery in vivid word pictures that caught and held the attention of millions of readers.Though the book was unfair to the South and was denounced as a hideous distortion of the truth,it was quickly dramatized and played in every city and town throughout the North.Topsy,Little Eva,Uncle Tom,the fleeing slave,Eliza Harris,and the cruel slave driver,Simon Legree,with his baying blood hounds,became living specters in many a home that sought to bar the door to the "unpleasant and irritating business of slavery agitation."
The Drift of Events toward the Irrepressible ConflictRepeal of the Missouri Compromise.-To practical men,after all,the "rub-a-dub"agitation of a few abolitionists,an occasional riot over fugitive slaves,and the vogue of a popular novel seemed of slight or transient importance.They could point with satisfaction to the election returns of 1852;but their very secu-rity was founded upon shifting sands.The magnificent triumph of the pro-slav-ery Democrats in 1852brought a turn in affairs that destroyed the foundations under their feet.Emboldened by their own strength and the weakness of their opponents,they now dared to repeal the Missouri Compromise.The leader in this fateful enterprise was Stephen A.Douglas,Senator from Illinois,and the occasion for the deed was the demand for the organization of territorial govern-ment in the regions west of Iowa and Missouri.
Douglas,like Clay and Webster before him,was consumed by a strong passion for the presidency,and,to reach his goal,it was necessary to win the support of the South.This he undoubtedly sought to do when he introduced on January 4,1854,a bill organizing the Nebraska territory on the principle of the Compromise of 1850;namely,that the people in the territory might themselves decide whether they would have slavery or not.Unwittingly the avalanche was started.
After a stormy debate,in which important amendments were forced on Douglas,the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became a law on May 30,1854.The measure created two territories,Kansas and Nebraska,and provided that they,or territories organized out of them,could come into the union as states "with or without slavery as their constitutions may prescribe at the time of their admission."Not content with this,the law went on to declare the Missouri Compromise null and void as being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the states and territories.Thus by a single blow the very heart of the continent,dedicated to freedom by solemn agreement,was thrown open to slavery.A desperate struggle between slave owners and the advocates of freedom was the outcome in Kansas.
If Douglas fancied that the North would receive the overthrow of the Missouri Compromise in the same temper that it greeted Clay's settlement,he was rapidly disillusioned.A blast of rage,terrific in its fury,swept from Maine to Iowa.Staid old Boston hanged him in effigy with an inion-"Stephen A.
Douglas,author of the infamous Nebraska bill:the Benedict Arnold of 1854."City after city burned him in effigy until,as he himself said,he could travel from the Atlantic coast to Chicago in the light of the fires.Thousands of Whigs and Free-soil Democrats deserted their parties which had sanctioned or at least tolerated the Kansas-Nebraska Bill,declaring that the startling measure showed an evident resolve on the part of the planters to rule the whole country.A gage of defiance was thrown down to the abolitionists.An issue was set even for the moderate and timid who had been unmoved by the agitation over slavery in the Far South.That issue was whether slavery was to be confined within its existing boundaries or be allowed to spread without interference,thereby placing the free states in the minority and surrendering the federal government wholly to the slave power.