 The rise of aggressive abolitionism and the national celebrity of black Americans like Frederick Douglass, as well as the ongoing public successes of the Underground Railroad, further exacerbated slaveholders' patience. Southern enslavers and some of their northern colleagues believed that only federal legislation could solve the fugitive slave crisis, protect slave-state interests, and save the Union. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act fully immersed the federal government in the process of retrieving fugitives from slavery.