In 1841 the anti-slavery sentiment had so far increased in the State as to take political form, and votes enough were cast for the candidate of the Liberty party for governor to prevent an election by the people. Two years later the assembly enacted that no officer or citizen of the State should seize or assist in the seizure of "any person for the reason that he is or may be claimed as a fugitive slave," and that no officer or citizen should transport or assist in the transportation of such person to any place in or out of the State; and that, for like reason, no person should be imprisoned "in any jail or other building belonging to the State, or to any county, town, city, or person therein." When Congress in 1850, after a fierce storm of debate, passed the odious Fugitive Slave Law, which made United States marshals, and at their behest every citizen of the republic, servants of the arrogant slave power, and withheld from whoever might be claimed as a slave the right of testifying in his own behalf, Vermont was faithful to freedom and the spirit of her Constitution. Her legislature of the same year passed an act requiring States' attorneys "diligently and faithfully to use all lawful means to protect, defend, and procure to be discharged, every such person so arrested or claimed as a fugitive slave," and judicial and executive officers in their respective counties to inform their State's attorney of the intended arrest of any person claimed as a fugitive slave. In many of the Northern States slave-hunting waxed hot and eager under the national law, but the hunters never attempted to seize their prey in the land of the Green Mountain Boys, though there were fugitive slaves living there, and an occasional passenger still fared along the mysterious course of the Underground Railroad. Consequent upon the annexation of Texas came war with Mexico,--a war waged wholly in the interest of slavery extension, and forced by the great republic upon her younger sister, weak and distracted by swiftly recurring revolutions.