Professor A. B. Hart, of Harvard University, says:
"The Underground Railroad was not a route but a network; not an organization, but a conspiracy of thousands of people banded together for the deliberate purpose of depriving their Southern neighbors of their property and of defying the Fugitive Slave Laws of the United States."[[293]]
With such a system in active operation, it only became necessary, in order to invest the whole movement with the dignity of state usurpation and wrong, for states to enact the so-called Personal Liberty Laws.
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[289]
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Constitution of the United States, Article IV,
Sub-section 2.
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[290]
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Plymouth Colony Records, IX, p. 5, and Fugitive
Slaves, Boston, 1891, McDougall, p. 7.
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[291]
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History of the Ordinance of 1787, American
Antiquarian Society, new series, Vol. V, p. 315.
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[293]
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Slavery and Abolition, Hart, p. 228.
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