st odious aspects of slavery home to thousands
of men and women who would otherwise have been indifferent to the
system. Law-abiding business men, mechanics, farmers, and women, when
they saw peaceful negroes, who had resided in their neighborhoods
perhaps for years, torn away by federal officers and carried back to
bondage, were transformed into enemies of the law. They helped slaves to
escape; they snatched them away from officers who had captured them;
they broke open jails and carried fugitives off to Canada.

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.

[Illustration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]

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 CONFLICT

=Repeal of the Missouri Compromise.=--To practical men, after all, the
"rub-a-dub" agit