It was, then, this hell-dog of a law that had made it no longer safe for the fugitives in Boston. And who is he who shall undertake to paint the agony of those men and women? He must dip his pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse who aims to do it. Their years of security were over. The first news of the passage of the law drove scores of them to Canada, and day by day they were flying. Numbers of their people had already been taken from other cities into slavery, when the first slave case, that of Shadrach, occurred in Boston. Ten or twelve gallant black men burst into the court-room, and took Shadrach from his foes. Boston howled. Soon another fugitive, Sims, was dragged before the Commissioner. No rescue for him; the court-house was ringed with chains, under which the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and other Judges, crawled to their seats; the cutlasses and bludgeons of the Government begirt the captive, and fifteen hundred Boston gentlemen offered to put muskets to their shoulders, if desired, to insure his being taken into bondage. “The Fifteen Hundred Scoundrels,” Wendell Phillips christened this brigade of wretches, praying that bankruptcy might sit on the ledger of every one of them. Nine days the Abolitionists and Free-Soilers fought the case, impeded the Jedburgh justice—the bitter mockery of that infamous trial; then Sims was environed with cutlasses and pistols, marched, at early dawn, to the vessel a Boston merchant volunteered for his rendition, and sent into slavery. The only news of him after that, was that he had been scourged to death at Savannah. His capture and murder completed the ghastly alarm of the Boston fugitives. From that hour they lived in an atmosphere of unimaginable fear and gloom. Frequent reports that kidnappers were in town, harried many of them off to join the thirty thousand fugitives who had fled from the tender mercies of America to seek refuge in the bleak wilds or towns of Canada. Churches were suspended; business arrested; families were broken up; wives and husbands separated; fathers had to leave their sons; sons their fathers; parents their children; for the peril was often immediate, and there was no time for delay. At every fresh rumor that kidnappers were in town, the colored people would hurry up from their occupations to their homes—some to fly, aided by their richer brethren, or by the compassion of the anti-slavery people—others to gather in the streets in excited discussion—and others, with that desperate and splendid courage which is one of the distinctive virtues of the negro, to fortify their dwellings, and prepare for a death-grapple with their hunters. Thick-crowding cares and fears, distress, alarm, foreboding, agony, few friends, a thousand foes, this was their bitter portion.