USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Even though the northern states could abolish slavery, as they did, they still could not avoid their Constitutional obligation to enforce the slave laws of the southern states. A fugitive slave carried with him the legal status of slavery, even into a territory which didn’t have slavery.

Detailed explanation-2: -Northerners bristled at the idea of turning their states into a stalking ground for bounty hunters, and many argued the law was tantamount to legalized kidnapping. Some abolitionists organized clandestine resistance groups and built complex networks of safe houses to aid enslaved people in their escape to the North.

Detailed explanation-3: -The Fugitive Slave Law produced widespread outrage in the North and convinced thousands of Northerners that slavery should be barred from the western territories. Attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law provoked wholesale opposition.

Detailed explanation-4: -In response, black Americans and their white allies used force to protect fugitive slaves, sometimes attacking and even killing their pursuers. Conflicts sparked by the Fugitive Slave Law also infuriated southern slaveholders, who believed that the federal government was failing to keep northern abolitionists in check.