May 21, 1842

During an overnight stop in Princeton, Illinois, escaped slave Nelson Hackett, who had been extradited back to Arkansas from Canada after a request by Governor Archibald Yell, escaped. He was captured two days later by a farmer from whom he had sought food. On May 26, he was temporarily kept in a Missouri jail, and, by the next month, he was back in Fayetteville (Washington County). Hackett’s case provoked a public furor in Canada, which had long been a haven for those who had fled slavery in the United States, and many abolitionists worried that the case set a precedent by which the American slaveocracy would seek the return of their human property by means of extradition requests.