It is true that the Constitution commanded the return of fugitive slaves, and that the Supreme Court of the United States had interpreted the provision as vesting the power of executing this command in, and imposing the duty of its execution exclusively upon, the general Government, but it was a fatal policy for the slaveholders to insist upon the realization of this right through the general Government. In fact, it was a fatal policy to insist upon its realization at all. There was no way to effect it without requiring the aid of the North in the perpetuation of slavery. The attempt to effect it was, therefore, the assumption of an offensive attitude on the part of the slaveholders, an attitude which was bound to {367} provoke a general hostility to slavery throughout the North, instead of the indifference which had prevailed under the idea that slavery was an institution of the Southern Commonwealths, with which the North and the general Government had no concern. Calhoun and Rhett and Davis had seen this danger, and they were not supporters of a national fugitive slave law. They preferred to consider the matter of the rendition of fugitive slaves as a special compact between the "States," and treat its non-fulfilment as a rupture of the Union. Possibly, protected as their "States" were by the border slaveholding Commonwealths, they did not feel the necessity of such a law. At any rate, it was the border slaveholding Commonwealths which wanted the law. [Sidenote: The first cases under the new law.] The first apprehension of an escaped slave, under the new Act, was made in the city of New York. One James Hamlet, who had three years before left his mistress, Mary Brown, of Baltimore, was the victim. He had a wife and children in New York. He was surprised at his work, hastily tried, and delivered to Mrs. Brown's agent, who conducted him back to Baltimore. When the news of the event spread abroad it created great excitement among the negro population throughout the North, and great indignation on the part of the white citizens in many quarters. [Sidenote: The opposition to the execution of the law.] It was calculated that there were from fifteen to twenty thousand escaped slaves living at that time in the non-slaveholding Commonwealths who were liable to apprehension under the law; and every person having any negro blood, whether escaped from slavery or not, felt the insecurity created by the law. Meetings of persons belonging to these classes were immediately held in Boston and New York, and resolutions were passed at them, praying the white people to move for the repeal of the law.