William and Ellen Craft were approximately twenty-four years old and had, a few months earlier, been property. Now they stood in lecture halls and made the case — not in abstract moral terms but in the immediate, specific, embodied terms of what had happened to them — that the system was what it claimed to be.
## The Fugitive Slave Act and the Hunters From Macon
Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850. The Act was specifically designed to close the gap the Crafts had slipped through. Under the previous legal framework, Northern states with personal liberty laws could resist the return of fugitives. The new Act preempted those laws and made it a federal crime to assist anyone who had escaped slavery, requiring even citizens of free states to cooperate in the capture and return of fugitives. The penalties were severe. The rewards were real.
Two men arrived in Boston that autumn: Willis Hughes and John Knight, sent from Macon by Robert Collins, the man who had enslaved Ellen. Their mission was to bring the Crafts back to Georgia.
Boston’s response was remarkable. The Vigilance Committee — which had been reconstituted and expanded after the Fugitive Slave Act passed — mobilized around the Crafts with a thoroughness that went well beyond political sympathy. The Committee met almost continuously. Its members arrested Hughes and Knight on charges of conspiracy to kidnap and defamation. They were released but the legal harassment continued. Crowds followed them through the streets. The atmosphere made their work nearly impossible.