Encouraged by this victory, the friends of free mails succeeded in having a provision incorporated into the Act of July 2nd, 1836, for changing the organization of the Post-Office Department, which ordains that any postmaster intentionally detaining any mail matter from the addressees shall be fined and imprisoned, and incapacitated to hold thereafter the office of a postmaster in the United States. [Sidenote: General results of the struggle over the right of petition and the freedom of the mails.] It would not be extravagant to say that the whole course of the internal history of the United States from 1836 to 1861 was more largely determined by the struggle in Congress over the Abolition petitions and the use of the mails for the distribution of the Abolition literature than by anything else. {275} In the first place, it did more than anything else to make a political party out of the Abolitionists, through the conviction which it produced throughout the North that the demands of the slavery system in the South would ultimately destroy civil and political liberty in the North, and it increased the strength of the Abolitionists an hundredfold in less than four years. The development and ultimate triumph of this party in the North became inevitable from the moment that it was clearly recognized that the preservation of slavery at the South required and demanded the denial of the freedom of speech and of the press, and of the right of petition, to the people of the North. In the second place, it taught the South that there was a growing party in the North which was determined to attack slavery at every possible legal point, and prosecute its warfare at every hazard, and that the only safety for the South, with its slavery system, in the Union, was to hold at least equal power in the Congress with the representation from the North. In self-defence the South must secure, therefore, the formation of new slaveholding Commonwealths. At the moment the representation in the Senate was evenly balanced, but in the House it stood against the South, one hundred and forty-one to ninety-nine. One more non-slaveholding Commonwealth, without an offset on the other side, would destroy the balance in the Senate and enable the North to undertake legislation hostile to slavery. The extension of slavery to new Commonwealths was thus manifestly a necessity to its permanent security, and even continuance, in the Commonwealths where it already existed. The policy of the slaveholders must be to allow no new non-slaveholding Commonwealth to be formed without another slaveholding Commonwealth to match it, and to secure the {276} extension of the territory of the United States toward the South.