After the return of the Phillipses, the anti-slavery work was taken up more vigorously than ever. Colored children were not allowed to study in the schools with white in Boston. Phillips agitated till separate colored schools were abolished. He appealed to the Legislature of his native State to compel railroads, as common carriers, to admit the negro to the cars, and finally was successful. He shared, like Henry Ward Beecher and Lucretia Mott, the discomforts of the colored man. Frederick Douglass said, in his oration on Phillips, given before his own race, in Washington, 1884: "On one occasion, after delivering a lecture to the New Bedford Lyceum, before a highly cultivated audience, when brought to the railroad station (as I was not allowed to travel in a first-class car, but was compelled to ride in a filthy box called the 'Jim Crow' car), he stepped to my side, in the presence of his aristocratic friends, and walked with me straight into this miserable dog-car, saying, 'Douglass, if you cannot ride with me, I can ride with you.' "On the Sound, between New York and Newport, in those dark days, a colored passenger was not allowed abaft the wheels of the steamer, and had to spend the night on the forward deck, with horses, sheep, and swine. On such trips, when I was a passenger, Wendell Phillips preferred to walk the naked deck with me to taking a state-room. I could not persuade him to leave me to bear the burden of insult and outrage alone." In 1850 the "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery was reaching its climax. The Fugitive-Slave Law, fathered by Henry Clay, and, to the dismay of a large portion of the North, upheld by Daniel Webster in his 7th of March speech, had been signed by the President, Millard Fillmore, Sept. 18, 1850. This bill made slave-hunting and the return of slaves to their masters a duty. A great company, presided over by Charles Francis Adams, and addressed by Phillips and others, in Faneuil Hall, protested; but the North was powerless or suppliant. Mobs broke up anti-slavery meetings in New York City. Colored men, on one pretext or another, were seized and carried back to slavery. On April 3, 1851, Thomas Sims, a slave, was arrested in Boston, and, after a hurried examination before the United States Commissioner, was given up to his pursuers. The poor slave youth begged this favor: "Give me a knife," he said, "and when the commissioner declares me a slave, I will stab myself to the heart, and die before his eyes." At midnight the Mayor of Boston, with two or three hundred policemen, heavily armed, placed Sims on board the ship Acorn, and sent him back into bondage.