The brutal reality of turning the entire United States into a slave catchers’ paradise meant that Blacks had very few places to run; they were going to have to stand and fight and defend themselves “with the surest and most deadly weapons, including bowie knives and revolvers.”193 Frederick Douglass clarified that the only way to make the Fugitive Slave Act dead law was to have “half a dozen or more dead kidnappers carried down South.”
