was equally as important in maintaining white power over black communities and perpetuating an enslaved workforce. This blurring of the line between the private and public sphere is another way Davis articulates how black women's sexuality and reproduction was commodified and exploited for capitalist gain, as their private and intimate lives became disrupted by the violence at the hands of white men, and their sexual capacities became an important part of the public marketplace and United States economy. Despite this, the slave population transported by the Atlantic slave trade to the United States was sex-balanced and most survived the passage. Despite lacking legal recognition, most slaves in the antebellum South lived in families, unlike the trans-Saharan slave trade with Africa, which was overwhelmingly female and in which the majority died en route crossing the Sahara (with the large majority of the minority of male African slaves dying as a result of crude castration procedures to produce eunuchs, who were in demand as harem attendants). 1850s In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, as part of the Compromise of 1850, which required law enforcement and citizens of free states to cooperate in the capture and return of slaves. This met with considerable overt and covert resistance in free states and cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Refugees from slavery continued to flee the South across the Ohio River and other parts of the Mason–Dixon line dividing North from South, to the North and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Some white Northerners helped hide former slaves from their former owners or helped them reach freedom in Canada. As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress abolished the slave trade (though not the ownership of slaves) in the District of Columbia; fearing this would happen, Alexandria, regional slave trading center and port, successfully sought its removal from the District of Columbia and devolution to Virginia. After 1854, Republicans argued that the "Slave Power", especially the pro-slavery Democratic Party in the South, controlled two of the three branches of the Federal government. The abolitionists, realizing that the total elimination of slavery was unrealistic as an immediate goal, worked to prevent the expansion of slavery into the western territories which eventually would be new states. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Bleeding Kansas period dealt with whether new states would be slave or free, or how that was to