The Compromise of 1850 began to come apart almost immediately. Surprisingly, the thread that unraveled it was not slavery in the territories, the crux of the disagreement, but runaway slaves in New England, a part of the settlement that had previously received little attention. The implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act brought the horrors of slavery into the North. Moreover, millions of Northerners who never saw a runaway slave confronted slavery through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that vividly depicts the brutality of the South’s “peculiar institution.” Congress did its part to undo the Compromise as well. Four years after Congress stitched the sectional compromise together, it ripped the threads out. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, it again posed the question of slavery in the territories, the deadliest of all sectional issues.