[wiTrHRow ] THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY 73 
negroes eagerly looking for familiar faces. Strange and solemn re- 
unions, after years of separation and hardship, took place along the 
friendly shores of Canada.” 
A large number of fugitives from slavery considered themselves 
safe, at least till after 1850, within the borders of the Free States. 
Josiah Henson estimated that in 1852 there were as many as 50,000 
former slaves living in the various Free States. But this was always 
at considerable risk of being kidnapped or, after the Fugitive Slave 
Act of 1850, of being legally restored to bondage. “The Southern 
people,” says Professor Siebert, “apparently regarded their right 
to recover their escaped slaves as unquestionable as their right to 
reclaim their strayed cattle, and they were determined to have the 
former as freely and fully recognized in the North as the latter.” 
There sprang up a class of men who made it their business to 
track runaway slaves. They watched the advertisements of such 
runaways, and haunted the abolition communities or towns for their 
detection. The Rev. L. B. Grimes, a coloured man, had organized a 
church of fugitive slaves in Boston. On the enactment of the Fugi- 
tive Slave Bill forty of them fled to Canada. One of the number, 
Shadrach, was arrested, but made his escape. Sims, another, under 
guard of three hundred Boston policemen, was restored to slavery. 
The Rev. J. S. C. Abbott recites a stirring story of another 
rescue in Boston. A fugitive slave girl married a coloured man 
named Crafts in that city. To them were born two children. “A 
young, healthy, energetic mother with two fine boys was a rich prize.” 
An attempt was, therefore, made in 1852 to abduct them. “These 
Boston boys,” says Siebert, “born beneath the shadow of Faneuil 
Hall, the sons of a free citizen of' Boston, and educated in the Boston 
free schools, were, by the compromises of the Constitution, admitted 
to be slaves, the property of'a South Carolinian planter. The Boston 
father had no right to his own sons.” Warned in time the mother 
fled with her children and escaped by a Cunard steamer to Halifax. 
Senator Charles Sumner declared that “as many as six thousand 
Christian men and women, meritorious persons,—a larger band than 
that of the escaping Puritans,— precipitately fled from homes which 
they had established.” 
The Coloured Baptist Church of Rochester out of a membership 
of one hundred and fourteen fugitive slaves lost a hundred and twelve, 
including the pastor who fled for safety to Canada. Similar numbers 
escaped from Buffalo, Detroit and other border cities. The persons 
who aided the escape of such fugitives were subject to severe penalties 
even before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. In 1847 Mr. 
Giltner, of Kentucky, was amerced in fines of $2,752 for such an 
