5. Reread the following quotation from paragraph 52: "By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form." To what act is Douglass referring here?
Here Douglass refers to the effects of the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the provisions of the Compromise of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act dictated that slaves who fled to the North were still considered captive by law and thus were to be returned to their owners.
