A slave woman, Margaret Morgan, had fled from Maryland to Pennsylvania. Five years later, in 1837, Edward Prigg, an attorney, caused her to be arrested and sent back to her mistress without recourse either to the national or State act on the subject. In the act he disregarded a law of Pennsylvania, brought about in 1826 through the efforts of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, which forbade the carrying out of the State of any negro with the intention of enslaving him. Accordingly, Mr. Prigg was arrested and convicted in the county court. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania sustained the decision. Thence the case was taken to the Supreme Court of the United States. There the counsel for Mr. Prigg argued that the statute of Pennsylvania on which the indictment was founded was unconstitutional, since it conflicted with the law of 1793. Justice Story delivered the opinion of the court, and upon this decision all future judgments were based. He announced that the law must be carried out through national authorities alone; the States or State magistrates could not be forced into action.[146] After this, many States, seeing the advantage thus given them, passed laws which forbade the officers to aid in a fugitive slave case, and also denied the use of their jails for imprisonment.[147] Plainly the Prigg case showed a growing indisposition on the part of the States to carry out the law, however severe its provisions might be; and this disposition to evade its obligations is still further evidenced by the cases given in the next chapter. =§ 26. Necessity of more stringent fugitive slave provisions.=--The increasing number of rescues,[148] and the occurrence of several cases of resistance, proved conclusively the inadequacy of the law of 1793. After the Prigg decision the provisions made for its execution through national powers were entirely insufficient. Underlying all these acts, the South also could but perceive a sentiment the growth of which, unless checked in some way, would at last permanently injure, if not destroy, their peculiar institution. =§ 27. Action of Congress from 1847 to 1850.=--From 1822 until 1848 apparently no effort was made to secure a new law. Then a petition received in 1847 from the Legislature of Kentucky, urging the importance of passing such laws as would enable the citizens of slaveholding States to recover their slaves when they escaped into non-slaveholding States,[149] gave rise to a bill from the Committee on the Judiciary.[150] The bill provided "for the more effectual execution of the third clause of the second section of the Fourth Article of the Constitution."[151] It passed only to the second reading. In 1849, Mr. Meade proposed in the House to instruct the Committee on the Judiciary to report a fugitive slave bill.[152] No report apparently was ever made, but this was the last ineffectual proposition. In 1850, a new law was successfully carried in both Houses.