Final answer:
Connecticut writers blamed southern slaveholders and their influence over federal power for the Fugitive Slave Act. The act's affront to northern jurisdiction and its moral implications were resoundingly critiqued in works like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Act fostered abolitionist resistance and heightened sectional tensions, leading to the Civil War.
Step-by-step explanation:
Connecticut writers and other northern voices seemed to place blame for the Fugitive Slave Act squarely on the shoulders of the southern slaveholders and their disproportionate influence over federal legislation. The act, part of the Compromise of 1850, directly confronted northern states' autonomy, compelling them to partake in the recovery of fugitive slaves while stripping fugitives and free blacks of legal protections. This expansion of federal power for the protection of slavery ignited strong opposition in the North, leading to an increase in abolitionist activities and contributing to a sectional rift.
The famed novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, which emerged as part of the protest against the Fugitive Slave Act, was a cogent indictment of the institution of slavery and the corrosive moral impact it had not only on enslaved people but on white citizens as well. Stowe's tale, along with publicized resistance efforts like those surrounding the Anthony Burns case, underlined the moral conflict inflamed by the Fugitive Slave Act. Furthermore, the law's execution revealed the existence of a perceived "Slave Power," where a minority of elites seemed to exert their will over the federal government, stirring additional unrest in the North and contributing to the escalating tensions that would eventually lead to the Civil War.
Northerners, including residents of Connecticut, viewed the Fugitive Slave Act as an imposition that forced them to participate in the sustenance of slavery, a notion they found repugnant. High-profile cases and the resultant resistance efforts, including those by abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and the expansion of the Underground Railroad, exemplified the ever-growing divide that foreshadowed the impending national conflict.