There is little to interest any but the politician in the political history of the State during the uneventful years of three decades following the War of 1812. At the next election after the close of the war the Republican party proved strong enough to elect to the governorship its candidate, Jonas Galusha, who was continued in that office for the five succeeding terms. When, in consequence of the abduction of Morgan, the opposing parties were arrayed as Masonic and anti-Masonic in the battle of ballots, the Masonic party of Vermont went to the wall. When the two great parties of the nation rallied under their distinctive banners as Whigs and Democrats, Vermont took its place with the first, and held it steadfastly alike through defeats and infrequent triumphs of the party until its dissolution. So constantly was its vote given to the state and national candidates of the Whigs that it gained the title of "The Star that never sets." From the adoption of its Constitution[108] in 1777, which prohibited slave-holding, Vermont has been the opponent of slavery. The brave partisan leader, Captain Ebenezer Allen, only expressed the freedom-loving sentiment of the Green Mountain Boys when he declared he was "conscientious that it is not right in the sight of God to keep slaves," and set free those taken prisoners with the British troops on Lake Champlain. It was natural that among the descendants of those people, the inhabitants of a mountain land such as ever nourishes the spirit of liberty and wherein slavery has never found a congenial soil, there should be found many earnest men ready to join the crusade which, under the leadership of Garrison, began in 1833 to assail the great national sin with a storm of denunciation. They denounced the scheme of African colonization, which had a respectable following in Vermont, as a device of the slave power to rid itself of the dangerous element of free blacks, under pretense of Christianizing Africa while here gradual emancipation should be brought about; and thus they aroused the antagonism of the body of the clergy, who had been hoodwinked by the pious plausibility of the plan. A line of the Underground Railroad held its hidden way through Vermont, along which many a dark-skinned passenger secretly traveled, concealed during the day in the quiet stations, at night passing from one to another, helped onward by friendly hands till he reached Canada and gained the protection of that government which in later years was to become the passive champion of his rebellious master. The star-guided fugitive might well feel an assurance of liberty when his foot touched the soil that in the old days had given freedom to Dinah Mattis and her child, and draw a freer breath in the State whose judge in later years demanded of a master, before his runaway slave would be given up to him, that he should produce a bill of sale from the Almighty.[109]