Change of Attitude of the Slaveholders by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850--The First Cases Under the New Law--The Opposition to the Execution of the Law--Establishment of the "Underground"--The Support of the Law by the Political Leaders--The President's Support of the Law--Joshua R. Giddings--Petitions for the Repeal of the Law--The Shadrach Case--The Investigation of the Case by Congress--The Question of Increasing the Power of the President to Execute the Law--The Sims Case--Excitement in Boston Over the Rendition of Sims--The "Jerry Rescue"--The President's Rebuke--Mr. Foote's Finality Resolutions--The Failure of the Resolutions to Pass the Senate, but Their Success in the House--The National Conventions of 1852 and the Finality of the Compromise Measures--The Deaths of Clay and of Webster, and the Appearance of a Free-soil Candidate--The Overwhelming Democratic Victory of 1852--The True Policy of the Slaveholders, and Their Failure to Discern It. [Sidenote: Change of attitude of the slaveholders by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.] Down to the time of the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, it may be said that the slaveholders were acting, in a certain sense, on the defensive. Before 1787, slavery had been regarded as a temporary relation, demanded by the moral and intellectual degradation of the Africans, and by the necessities of the social structure in which Anglo-Saxon and negro were brought together. It had been considered that the rise of the negro in civilization, by his contact with the white race, {366} would gradually change this relation in the direction of freedom. In fact it had done so, in a considerable degree. But the formation of the Constitution of 1787, the invention and use of the cotton-gin, the acquisition of Louisiana, and the general subsidence of the revolutionary spirit of the eighteenth century, were all unfavorable to further progress in this only proper and correct direction. Between 1830 and 1840, a strong retrogressive movement set in, as we have seen, provoked indeed, in a considerable degree, by the Abolition propaganda; and in consequence of it, the slaveholders abandoned the only moral principle upon which slavery could be justified, and began to adopt the idea of the permanency of the relation, and to undertake the adjustment of the laws, customs, institutions, and policies of the country to this idea. And, at last, by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, they committed the whole country to this course. In a word, they made slavery by this law a national matter, and they did it from the property point of view of slavery, the point of view which exhibits it in its most hateful light, and from which no moral justification whatsoever for its existence can be found.