Even colored people who had been free all their lives felt themselves very insecure in their freedom, for under this law the oaths of any two villains were sufficient to consign a free man to slavery for life.
Douglass highlights how the Fugitive Slave Act endangered even lifelong free Black people, as false testimony could easily condemn them to slavery.
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We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.
Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.