Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Ona Judge, George Washington's fugitive slave" video.

By about 1800 it became nearly impossible to reclaim slaves the had fled to New England. There was a groundswell of opinion against slavery in states like New Hampshire, and an even greater resistance to having any now free slaves being removed by force. Even when slave recovery agents arrived with warrants to seize the slave, no one in local law enforcement would cooperate. In some case, the recovery agent himself would be arrested and thrown in jail, allowing the slave he was seeking to flee. One of the reasons the Underground Railroad worked was the collusion of local authorities with the "conductors ' of the railroad to move slaves north to free states and Canada. Ohio became a hotbed of opposition to slavery and support of the railroad. It was also the main route across Lake Erie to Canada for former slaves wanting to leave the country. Southerners were initially baffled by this. Slaves were their property, and why would another state refuse to help return their property? It was looked at then much as a stolen car today, where other state cooperate to recover the property. I obviously don't believe that slaves really were property, but the stolen car analogy is used to show how slave owners viewed the situation. The trickle of 1805 turned into a flood by 1850 with over 100,000 slaves successfully fleeing north to freedom. Southerners believed that this was going to drain the South of all its labor when even the federal government refused to help. Seeing the ruin of the plantation economy not far around the corner, the Underground Railroad was one of the proximate causes of the Southern states decision to secede and go to war if it came to that.
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@michaelbrennan6123 Yes, I do, although the Constitution wasn't the operative law about returning slaves, it was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Most jurisdictions in the North simply refused to comply with the law, and at least two states, Vermont and Wisconsin passed their own laws nullifying the Federal law. Unfortunately, this set a new nullification crisis in motion that resulted in the south declaring their right to also nullify Federal laws. The issues of the Civil War were firmly set by the middle of the 1850's.
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