Such, however, was not the case. On one side the slave power was greatly strengthened by the admission of Texas to the Union as a slave State; but, on the other hand, there came a large accession to the antislavery body. And this continued to be the case during many years. The slave power won a succession of political victories, each of which was a moral victory to its opponents. Many who were not converted to antislavery by the annexation of Texas in 1845 were brought over by the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Many who were not alarmed by these successes of slavery were convinced of the danger when they beheld the actual working of the Fugitive Slave Act. How many Boston gentlemen, before opposed to the Abolitionists, were brought suddenly to their side when they saw the Court House in chains, and were prevented by soldiers guarding Anthony Burns from going to their banks or insurance offices in State Street! All those bitter hours of defeat and disaster planted the seeds of a greater harvest for freedom. Others who remained insensible to the disgrace of the slave laws of 1850 were recruited to the ranks of freedom by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854. This last act, Mr. Wilson justly says, did more than any other to arouse the North, and convince it of the desperate encroachments of slavery. Men who tamely acquiesced in _this_ great wrong were startled into moral life by the murderous assault on Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks in 1856. Those who could submit to this were roused by the border ruffians from Missouri who invaded Kansas, and made the proslavery Constitution for that State. The Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared slavery to be no local institution, limited to a single part of the land, but having a right to exist in the free States under the Constitution, alarmed even those who had been insensible to the previous aggressions of slavery. This series of political successes of the slave power was appalling. Every principle of liberty, every restraint on despotism, was overthrown in succession, until the whole power of the nation had fallen into the hands of an oligarchy of between three and four hundred thousand slaveholders. But every one of their political victories was a moral defeat; every access to their strength as an organization added an immense force to the public opinion opposed to them; and each of their successes was responded to by some advance of the antislavery movement. The annexation of Texas in 1845 was answered by the appearance of John P. Hale, in 1847, in the United States Senate,--the first man who was elected to that body on distinctly antislavery grounds and independent of either of the great parties. The response to the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso and passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 was the election of Charles Sumner to the Senate in April, 1851, and the establishment of the underground railroad in all the free States.