What would have happen if William and Ellen craft had been caught?

Answer 1

No greater suffering can one man place on another than to take away his freedom.

There is no doubt that the institution of slavery was (and still is) inhumane. It is intolerable that one man owns another. However, mass media and common misunderstandings about history have painted phantasms where few existed.

We have few reliable stories that illustrate exactly what happened to fugitive slaves who were captured. One that we do have is the story of Anthony Burns, a man who escaped from his owner, Charles Suttle, in 1854. Burns' case became nationally known when he was prosecuted in Boston, Massachusetts under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and returned to Suttle in Macon, Georgia. We also know that this is one of the cases that led eventually to the division of the country alone slaver and abolitionist lines.

What we also know is that Burns was not harmed during his capture, incarceration, or after his return. He was immediately sold to another owner in the Carolinas and had his freedom purchased. He returned shortly after to Boston.

While slavery was a heinous situation by today's standards, it is important to note that it was the economic standard of its time. For all intents and purposes, those enslaved were livestock. Of course it is inhumane to look at another person as being less than human, but the slaves, once here lived largely better than that of non-slave-owning subsistence farmers of the same time, and relatively few were mistreated. Pardon the metaphor, but a farmer who makes a living off the back of another is not likely to break that back.