After the Act of 1826 the border troubles, especially between York and Lancaster Counties, Pennsylvania, and Cecil, Harford and Baltimore Counties, Maryland, were much intensified. Mason and Dixon line was the imaginary demarcation between two wholly antagonistic social and political orders. The same person might be a Maryland slave under Maryland law and a Pennsylvania freeman under Pennsylvania law. Owners and agents, armed with Maryland authority to reclaim property, made theirs by Maryland law, were felonious kidnappers in Pennsylvania. The anomalous condition of affairs and the legal difficulties arising out of it are best illustrated by actual facts. A slave woman escaped from her owner, James S. Mitchell, of Cecil County, Maryland, in 1845. During her absence, as a fugitive from his service, she had given birth in New Jersey to an illegitimate child. Through the instrumentality of agents, residing in Pennsylvania, Mitchell apprehended the woman, who together with the child, had been delivered to him at Elkton, in Cecil County. The woman was taken in Pennsylvania by George P. Alberti and James Frisby. These agents, themselves fearing to incur possible responsibilities, had repeatedly refused to take the child with the mother; until finally overcome by the entreaties of the mother herself, they yielded to their feelings of benevolence, and assumed the risk. They were arrested for kidnapping; evidence to show their motives in including the child in the return was excluded, and they were sentenced to long terms in the penitentiary--for permitting it to accompany the mother, whose own recapture and return by them were admittedly lawful. The state of the record of the case was such that it could not be appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Mitchell himself, who had not even been in Pennsylvania, was indicted here for kidnapping the child and was subject to seven years in the penitentiary. The Governor of Pennsylvania issued, and the Governor of Maryland declined to honor, a requisition for him. There were many other cases of which this was a type. On the other hand, there were unquestionably well-authenticated cases of slaves returned in violation of their legal claims and of free negroes brutally kidnapped and remorselessly sold to slavery without a fair hearing and adjudication of their rights. The offenders were often protected by legal technicalities, obstructions or difficulties, and by friendly jurisdictions North or South. A case pregnant with great legal and political consequences finally arose under the conflicting claims of Maryland and Harford County on one side and Pennsylvania and York County on the other. It reached the Supreme Court of the United States and the contest was a momentous battle in the campaign of pro- and anti-slavery agitation. Lawyers will find it fully reported in 16 Peters, U. S., 539 (1842):