slavery, while the North seemed to experience a shuddering horror over the Fugitive Slave Law, evading its rulings wherever possible with the passage of personal liberty laws. These laws were intended to protect free negroes falsely alleged to be fugitive slaves and threatened with reenslavement. Such a fate menaced many negroes who had been set free. This was true of the negroes Mary Baker Glover had freed. In the first place with freedom granted, the negro had had to leave the South to preserve it; now even in the North he might lose it if an unscrupulous trader claimed him.
In June, 1852, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was nominated for President at Baltimore by the Democratic National Convention which endorsed the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, and denounced slavery agitation. The Free Soil Democrats, a month later, nominated John P. Hale of New Hampshire for President. Daniel Webster, also of New Hampshire, would doubtless have been the Whig candidate but for his age and his uncompromising attitude in support of the Fugitive Slave Law. His death occurred in October of that year. New Hampshire was probably never more mentally excited and morally wrought in its history.
At this time Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his life of Pierce, a delightful biographic sketch. Pierce had married Jane Appleton, the daughter of the president of Bowdoin College, Hawthorne’s alma mater. Had Albert Baker been alive he, too, must have supported Pierce with pen and oratory.
