Beginning in 1829, Quakers settled Penn, Calvin, and Porter townships in Cass County, and free Blacks also settled there, with both groups living in harmony. Blacks in Cass County enjoyed rights such as owning land, trial by jury, and voting in elections, rights not available to all Blacks in the nation until the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Free Blacks and Quakers in this area formed the backbone of the Underground Railroad, providing food, shelter, employment, and assistance to people fleeing bondage on their way to freedom in Canada, where slavery was illegal. In August 1847, in one of the largest of many raids in Michigan, about 20 to 30 heavily armed men from Kentucky came to recapture people who had escaped slavery in Kentucky and remained in Cass County. They seized nine fugitives from four Quaker farms, but free Blacks and Quakers surrounded the raiders and persuaded them to go to Cassopolis for a legal decision. After the fugitives asserted their rights, 14 raiders were arrested for assault and battery, kidnapping, and trespass. A Berrien court commissioner heard the case and released the fugitives because the raiders could not produce a certified copy of the Kentucky statutes showing that slavery was legal, though they did have bills of sale. While the Kentuckians were on trial, 45 fugitives, including the nine captured in the raid, escaped to Canada. The commissioner was later found not to have jurisdiction, and seven Quakers were sued in U.S. District Court in Detroit for the value of the escapees. That trial ended in a hung jury, but with a retrial pending, two defendants paid damages and court costs in the final settlement. Incidents like these angered southern slave owners and helped lead to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it easier to recover runaways. Michigan responded with a Personal Liberty Act in 1855, and the 13th Amendment, ratified soon after the Civil War, made slavery illegal in the United States.