The Democratic victory was overwhelming. Twenty-seven Commonwealths gave their electoral vote for General Pierce, and only four gave theirs for General Scott; while the popular vote cast for Mr. Hale was only about one-half as large as that cast for Mr. Van Buren in 1848. The Democrats themselves were surprised. Since the "era of good feeling," no presidential candidate had received such a vote, either popular or electoral, as that now given to General Pierce. The country accepted the decision, and settled down into universal acquiescence in the Compromise Measures, and in the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, in most sections cheerfully, but in some sullenly and with bitterness of heart. [Sidenote: The true policy of the slaveholders, and their failure to discern it.] Had the slaveholders made a wise use of this, to them, most favorable turn in affairs, there is little question that they might have preserved indefinitely their peculiar institution where it existed. But wisdom in the case meant that the slaveholders should themselves give no further {378} occasion for slavery agitation. It meant that they should cease to claim the rendition of their fugitive slaves by the general Government; that they should turn their attention to perfecting the police administration in the slaveholding Commonwealths for preventing the escape of their slaves, and let the few slaves who might have cleverness enough to elude the police of these Commonwealths go; and that they should, above all things, abstain from any attempt to extend slavery beyond the limits placed upon it by existing law. The status of every inch of the territory of the United States, in reference to the legality or illegality of slavery, was now fixed, and the public opinion of the country, of the world, and of the age, would never permit that status to be altered to the advantage of slavery. It is an interesting, though by no means an inexplicable, fact that the slaveholders in the Commonwealths south of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, showed more tendency to follow this view of their best policy than those within these border Commonwealths. These latter were an efficient protection to the former in preventing the escape of slaves, while they were themselves exposed in much higher degree to loss. Still, it would have been the true policy for the slaveholders in these also to have looked to their own police administration for the recapture of their runaways before the latter had reached free soil, and to have considered that a slave having sufficient intelligence to elude this had already attained the point of mental activity and of courage which required in good morals his liberation, and made his further retention in slavery both a wrong to himself and a danger to the peace of the slaveholding community in which he might be held in bondage.