Thaddeus Stevens in September, 1851, was serving his second term as Representative of the Lancaster County district. As an antagonist of Southern ideas relating to slavery, he “strode down the aisles” of the House with a good deal more erectness of bearing than Ingersoll in his famous nominating speech ascribed to the “Plumed Knight” from Maine; and he struck the shield of his adversaries with a much louder ring than was given out at the impact of Mr. Blaine’s lance. To his individual and official view--law or no law, constitution or no constitution--slavery was “a violation of the rights of man as a man”--freedom was the law of nature. Like Mirabeau, “he swallowed all formulas.” But he was a lawyer, as well as a politician and moralist, and while he announced his “unchangeable hostility to slavery in every form in every place,” he also avowed his “determination to stand by all the compromises of the constitution and carry them into faithful effect”--much as he disliked some of them, they were not “now open for consideration,” nor would he disturb them. This again was practically an admission of the abstract legal right of the master to reclaim the fugitive. Mr. Stevens was first elected to Congress in 1848, when Gen. Zachariah Taylor was elected President, and when he died (July 9, 1850), and Fillmore, Vice President and a Northern Whig, succeeded him, Stevens had been elected to a second term, which lasted until March 4, 1853. In those “good old days” a Congressman had some influence in the matter of Federal appointments. The United States Marshal, who executed warrants and picked jurors in Eastern Pennsylvania, was Stevens’ personal and political friend, Anthony E. Roberts. Mr. Roberts, who was a native of Chester County, was then 48 years of age and long a prominent citizen of New Holland. He had been sheriff of Lancaster County elected in 1839 as an avowed anti-Masonic candidate, favored by Stevens. He was with him an active anti-Mason and was a candidate for Congress in 1843, but was beaten by Jeremiah Brown. President Taylor appointed him Marshal in 1849, and he filled the office until the incoming of Pierce’s administration. The _Intelligencer and Journal_, then edited by George Sanderson, was the regular organ of the Democratic party in Lancaster County. It was a weekly publication, and at that time a vigorous and exciting campaign for the State election in October was in progress. Col. William Bigler of Clearfield County was the Democratic nominee for Governor; General Seth Clover of Clarion County for Canal Commissioner, and for Judges of the Supreme Court the first ticket presented by the Democratic party under the new elective system bore the illustrious names of Jeremiah S. Black, Somerset; James Campbell, Philadelphia; Ellis Lewis, Lancaster; John B. Gibson, Cumberland, and Walter H. Lowrie, Allegheny.