In short, for thirty years, both spoken and unspoken congressional ground rules dictated the tone and tenor of debate, but always with an eye toward the status quo, designed to reduce the potential for sectional conflict. In Sumner’s view, the new Fugitive Slave Law could change all of that and finally provide an opening for drastic change. It was one thing for Northerners to consider slavery in the abstract, a system that occurred hundreds of miles away with little direct connection to their daily lives.
