The bill had just passed the House, 109 to 76. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the effect of the Fugitive Slave Act among citizens in the North, calling it “a sheet of lightning at midnight.” In the months that followed, arrests mounted. One man who had been living in Auburn for two years was returned to slavery, leaving behind his wife and child. Free Blacks, too, were caught in the dragnets and sent south to be sold. The transaction was so abhorrent, Frances wrote, it had roused even “the most phlegmatic.” Hundreds of people who lived in Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo fled to Canada.
