In his message to the General Assembly of Maryland at the following January Session, Governor Lowe referred at length to the Gorsuch tragedy. Despite the assurances of the Federal administration through Secretary of State Daniel Webster, that all the energies of the law would be exerted to bring the offenders to justice, Maryland had felt constrained to actively participate in the prosecution. “The blood of a Marylander,” he declared, “cried out from the earth; whilst the Genius of the Union called aloud for a vindication of outraged laws.” Otherwise “the flame of excitement would spread from the hills of Maryland to the savannahs of the extreme South, until every Southern State would unite in one common feeling of horror and indignation.” Senator Cooper had been retained by him; and despite the high ability and signal service of both him and Maryland’s Attorney General, there had been a gross miscarriage of justice. With a fervor of rhetoric that was more common then in State papers than it is now, he declared: “Shall domestic feuds destroy our power, when the eyes of all nations are turned to the star of our empire, as the harbinger of their deliverance? Shall Kossuth blast Hungary with the breath of our discord? Shall O’Brien, in his lonely exile, see the hope of Ireland pass down the horizon, with the western sun? May so incalculable a calamity be spared to the nations of the earth. And yet, when American blood is made to flow upon American soil, as a grateful libation to American fanaticism; when whole communities stand listlessly by, and a prostituted press and venal politicians are found, in the open day, to glory in the human sacrifice; when the Law proclaims its own weakness from the Bench, and Treason stalks unpunished, through the halls of justice; the Nations can judge of the probable remoteness of that calamity.” The official report of his Attorney General justified the Governor in becoming somewhat heated over the outcome at Philadelphia. Mr. Brent had suffered not only some personal irritation over his position there, but a keen professional disappointment in his failure to convict. The blame for this he distributed very generally among the people of the North who sympathized with resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law; the partisan character of the jury panel; the partiality of the daily press reports; the sympathy of the spectators; the treachery of the prison officials; the bribery of Scott, the government’s witnesses; and egregious errors of law committed by Judge Grier. Even the amiable Marshal did not escape criticism, as evinced by this paragraph: