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northern cities, where many African-Americans had been living peaceful lives in their first or second generation of freedom. 9 The law enraged and inspired northern abolitionists. In rapidly increasing numbers, they reacted by bringing the Underground Railroad above ground. Public meetings and support, along with overt defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law, became commonplace. The federal government’s inability to effectively enforce the law pleased and encouraged abolitionists.
    Many national leaders spoke out against the law. Powerful New York Republican senator William Seward spoke against it and Massachusetts Democratic senator Charles Sumner forced a doomed vote on the law’s repeal. The nationally known, splendidly articulate, and politically efficacious ex-slave Frederick Douglass was more incendiary in his reaction, stating: “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter [is] to make a dozen or more dead kidnappers.” 10
    Many heeded Douglass’s call. In Detroit, a federal agent taking a runaway slave to jail was pelted with paving stones by white citizens enraged by what they perceived as injustice. The prisoner was freed and sent across the Detroit River to Windsor. An abolitionist mob descended upon a Boston courthouse in which the ownership of a fugitive slave was being decided, and a man was killed in the riot that ensued. The president threatened to send federal troops to northern cities to protect the slave catchers.
    All at once, the slow but steady migration across the Canadian border became a flood. Within weeks of the law’s passage the city of Baltimore reported a problem in staffing hotels: all the Black waiters and porters had gone to Canada. Black churches in Buffalo and Rochester complained that their congregations had nearly all fled. 11 In the first three monthsafter the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, about three thousand African-Americans crossed into Canada. 12
    As more and more slaves and freemen traded their shackles and low-paying insecure jobs for Canadian freedom, even more elaborate campaigns were waged to capture and dissuade them. Additional state and local laws were passed, bounties were raised, more slave catchers were hired, and the punishments for escape attempts and abetting became increasingly violent and draconian. Many people who risked all to help runaway slaves were heavily fined or imprisoned for up to year. Kentucky’s Reverend Calvin Fairbank, for instance, was convicted of helping slaves to escape and handed a sentence of fifteen years’ hard labour. Those caught helping escaping slaves or freemen were often beaten and banished, and many had “SS” branded onto their left palm—slave stealer.
    Propaganda was also spread—that Canada is always frigidly cold; slavery existed in Canada with conditions worse than in the south; all runaways were imprisoned upon crossing the border. 13 But nothing worked. The lure of freedom remained stronger than frantic lies and desperate power. Canadian governor general Lord Elgin wrote to the British colonial secretary that Canada West was “flooded with blackies who are rushing across the frontier to escape from the bloodhounds whom the Fugitive Slave Bill has let loose on their track.” 14
    Many American slaves and freemen who fled to Canada had by that time come to play prominent roles in the country’s development. Wilson Abbott, for example, had been born a freeman in Richmond, Virginia, and run a successful grocery business in Mobile, Alabama. In 1834, he was warned that his store was about to be attacked and just in time escaped with his family first to New Orleans and then, in 1836, to Toronto. He operated a number of successful businesses and ploughed profits into real estate speculation, and soon found himself a leader among the city’s small but powerful Black elite. His son Anderson was the first Black graduate of Toronto’s King’s College and the first African-Canadian doctor. He later served as a