On September 18, 1850, President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring federal marshals to capture people accused of escaping from slavery and denying the accused the right to testify on their own behalf. Those who helped freedom seekers faced fines of $1000 for each person they helped and up to six months in jail, while judges who supported slave catchers received ten dollars and those who ruled for the accused received only five. The law aroused immediate opposition in Syracuse: within two days, African Americans organized a protest meeting chaired by James Baker, a freedom seeker from Georgia, which declared that a man's right to himself was God given and resolved that they would wear daggers in their belts in response to the recent slave-catching bill. On October 4, 1850, more than 500 Syracuse citizens met in City Hall to form a biracial Vigilance Committee. In May 1851, speaking from a balcony on the east side of the Courier Building, then known as Frazee Hall, U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster warned that anyone in Syracuse who refused to carry out the Fugitive Slave Law was guilty of treason and said the federal government would enforce the law there if the occasion arose. Reverend Samuel J. May, standing in the crowd, recalled defiant anger in the assembly. On October 1, 1851, while the antislavery Liberty Party convention met at the First Congregational Church just west of the Courier Building, federal marshal William Allen arrested William "Jerry" Henry, a cooper who had escaped from slavery in Missouri. A biracial group of hundreds of Syracuse citizens, both men and women, then helped Henry escape successfully to Kingston, Ontario, and after that the federal government never again tried to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in Syracuse.