slave-sojournment

Updated: May 10, 2025

The crisis was intensified, first, by the repeal on the part of certain free States of their slave-sojournment laws; second, by the extraordinary activity of the underground railroad; third, by increasing opposition in the North to the execution of the Fugitive Slave law, all of which, acting together, seriously impaired the value and security of slave property in the Union; fourth, by that fierce, obstinate, but futile, struggle of the South to obtain possession of Kansas, and the exposure thereby of its marked inferiority as a colonizer in competition with modern industrialism; fifth, by the growing influence of the abolition movement, and, sixth, by those nameless terrors of slave insurrections, which were evoked by the apparition of John Brown at Harper's Ferry.

Archibald Henry Grimké - Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States: The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12