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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 219

brain power to bear against it. I felt like a besieged city at news that its
defenders had fallen at its gates.

The hardships imposed by this atrocious and shameless law were cruel
and shocking, and yet only a few of all the fugitives of the Northern States
were returned to slavery under its infamously wicked provisions. As a means
of recapturing their runaway property in human flesh the law was an utter
failure. Its efficiency was destroyed by its enormity. Its chief effect was to
produce alarm and terror among the class subject to its operation, and this it
did most effectually and distressingly. Even colored people who had been free
all their lives felt themselves very insecure in their freedom, for under this law
the oaths of any two villains were sufficient to consign a free man to slavery
for life. While the law was a terror to the free, it was a still greater terror to
the escaped bondman. To him there was no peace. Asleep or awake, at work
or at rest, in church or market, he was liable to surprise and capture. By the
law the judge got ten dollars a head for all he could consign to slavery, and
only five dollars apiece for any which he might adjudge free. Although I was
now myself free, I was not without apprehension. My purchase was of doubtful,
validity, having been bought when out of the possession of my owner and
when he must take what was given or take nothing. It was a question whether
my claimant could be estopped by such a sale from asserting certain or supposable
equitable rights in my body and soul. From rumors that reached me
my house was guarded by my friends several nights, when kidnappers, had
they come, would have got anything but a cool reception, for there would
have been "blows to take as well as blows to give." Happily this reign of terror
did not continue long. Despite the efforts of Daniel Webster and Millard
Fillmore and our Doctors of Divinity, the law fell rapidly into disrepute. The
rescue of Shadrach resulting in the death of one of the kidnappers, in Boston,
the cases of Sims and Anthony Burns, in the same place, created the deepest
feeling against the law and its up-holders. But the thing which more than all
else destroyed the fugitive slave law was the resistance made to it by the fugitives
themselves. A decided check was given to the execution of the law at
Christiana, Penn., where three colored men, being pursued by Mr. Gorsuch
and his son, slew the father, wounded the son, and drove away the officers,
and made their escape to my house in Rochester. The work of getting these
men safely into Canada was a delicate one. They were not only fugitives from
slavery but charged with murder, and officers were in pursuit of them. There
was no time for delay. I could not look upon them as murderers. To me, they
were heroic defenders of the just rights of man against manstealers and murderers.
So I fed them, and sheltered them in my house. Had they been pursued