During the tumultuous decade before the Civil War, no issue was more divisive than the pursuit and return of fugitive slaves--a practice enforced under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When free Blacks and their abolitionist allies intervened, prosecutions and trials inevitably followed. These cases involved high legal, political, and--most of all--human drama, with runaways desperate for freedom, their defenders seeking recourse to a "higher law"...