the South in the war in which that dispute culminated both held that
view and acted consistently upon it.

On the North the effect of the new propaganda was different, but there
also it tended to increase the antagonism of the sections. The actual
Abolitionists of the school of Garrison were neither numerous nor
popular. Even in Boston, where they were strongest, they were often
mobbed and their meetings broken up. In Illinois, a Northern State, one
of them, Lovejoy, was murdered by the crowd. Such exhibitions of
popular anger were not, of course, due to any love of Slavery. The
Abolitionists were disliked in the North, not as enemies of Slavery but
as enemies of the Union and the Constitution, which they avowedly were.
But while the extreme doctrine of Garrison and his friends met with
little acceptance, the renewed agitation of the question did bring into
prominence the unquestionable fact that the great mass of sober Northern
opinion thought Slavery a wrong, and in any controversy between master
and slave was inclined to sympathize with the slave. This feeling was
probably somewhat strengthened by the publication in 1852 and the
subsequent huge international sale of Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
The practical effect of this book on history is generally exaggerated,
partially in consequence of the false view which would make of the Civil
War a crusade against Slavery. But a certain effect it undoubtedly had.
To such natural sympathy in the main, and not, as the South believed, to
sectional jealousy and deliberate bad faith, must be attributed those
"Personal Liberty Laws" by which in many Northern States the provision
of the Constitution guaranteeing the return of fugitive slaves was
virtually nullified. For some of the provisions of those laws an
arguable constitutional case might be made, particularly for the
provision which assured a jury trial to the escaped slave. The Negro, it
was urged, was either a citizen or a piece of property. If he were a
citizen, the Constitution expressly safeguarded him against imprisonment
without such a trial. If, on the other hand, he were property, then he
was property of the value of more than $50, and in cases where property
of that value was concerned, a jury was also legally required. If two
masters laid claim to the same Negro the dispute between them would have
to be settled by a jury. Why should it not be so where a master claimed
to own a Negro and the Negro claimed to