Finally, a compromise was arranged by which the federal government dropped the remaining prosecutions for the escape of Mary Ellen and released the prisoners, while the state authorities dismissed the suits against the slave trader’s agent and his companion and the members of the marshal’s posse. The episode was amicably settled, but the flames of contention had been so fed by it that they mounted higher and higher. Meetings continued to be held all over those portions of the state where anti-slavery sentiment was strong. They culminated, soon after Rhoda’s release, in an immense mass-convention at Cleveland attended by many thousand people and addressed by public men of distinction, where, amid the greatest enthusiasm, resolutions were passed denouncing the Dred Scott decision and declaring the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional and therefore void. In the pocket of the dress she had worn on the day of her arrest Rhoda chanced to find, soon after this convention, Charlotte’s note telling of her engagement. She smiled soberly as she thought of all the consequences that had resulted from this manifestation of her sister’s puckish spirit. “If she hadn’t misled me this way,” Rhoda’s thoughts ran, “I wouldn’t have forgotten about everything else the way I did for a few minutes, and I would have kept watch of Mary Ellen and made her keep her veil down, and then that man wouldn’t have recognized her, and we’d have gone right on and nothing would have happened!” Rhoda’s trial aroused the keenest interest all over the North. But it was an interest that cared only for principles. The personalities of those engaged in the matter were of the slightest consequence. Everywhere, in newspapers and in conversation, there was discussion of the affair, and of the consequences to which it might lead. But the people concerned in it were only so many cogs in a mighty Wheel of Fate, turning resistlessly, and ever about to bring into the present, out of the unknown future, no man could tell what. To the South and its northern sympathizers the whole affair was irritating and alarming in high degree. Democratic newspapers and their readers declared the attitude of “Chase and his abolition crew” to be equivalent to a declaration of war against the United States and welcomed the prospect, while the compromise by which the difficulty was finally settled they described with bitterness as “another triumph” for the creed of the “traitorous higher law with its open sanction of treason and rebellion.”