As tremendous a seller as *Uncle Tom's Cabin* was, one can argue that. at least at first, it hardly galvanized antislavery sentiment. After all, in the 1852 presidential election, the first one after the book was published, the Free Soil Party got only five percent of the vote (half of what it got in 1848), while Franklin Pierce swept the North as well as the South. It seemed that the northern public was willing to acquiesce in the Compromise of 1850--even including the Fugitive Slave Act. It was only *after* the South and its allies re-started sectional conflict with the Kansas-Nebraska Act that the majority of state "personal liberty laws" seeking to nullify the Fugitive Slae Act were passed.