Chapter 7 - Free Soil, Fiction, and the Fugitive Slave Act

Summary

Tensions over American slavery came to a head with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It drove many African Americans – free and fugitive alike – away from their homes in the North for fear that the law’s strict new policies on fugitive slave recovery would increase the likelihood of being captured or kidnapped into southern slavery. Using the wildly popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a guide, this chapter explores how the Fugitive Slave Act affected anti-slavery views regarding fugitive slaves, international free soil, and the Underground Railroad. It introduces readers to differing viewpoints and heated controversies surrounding the novel’s influence on the anti-slavery movement and it shows how the northward migration of tens of thousands of fugitive slaves contributed to a full-blown “Canada Culture” within the anti-slavery movement of the early 1850s.