The threat he faced was that he could be sent back again to a slave state in the South.
James Curry was a slave man who had run away from his master in North Carolina, near the Virginia border. When he got to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in July 1837, a man offered him a job and he accepted. However, that same day when he was having dinner in the employer's house, a colored woman warned him that people there tended to take fugitives back to the slave states again.
Curry very fearful, who had also perceived that the man was too curious about him, determined to get away from the house and left.