JAMES BUCHANAN.

    Hon. ROBERT J. WALKER.[11]

  [Sidenote] Report Covode Committee, p. 111.

The question naturally occurs, for whom did Calhoun speak when he approached Governor Walker, offering him the bribe of the Presidency and assuring him that the Administration had changed its mind?  That was before, or certainly not long after, the probable receipt of this letter in Kansas, for the Governor left the Territory (November 16) about one week after the adjournment of the Lecompton Convention.  The question becomes still more pressing owing to Governor Walker’s testimony that when he reached Washington, “the President himself distinctly and emphatically assured me that he had not authorized anybody to say that he had approved of that [Lecompton] programme.”  On whose authority, then, did Calhoun declare that the Administration had changed its mind?

[Illustration:  FREDERICK P. STANTON.]

  [Sidenote] John Bell, Senate Speech, March 18, 1858.

This query brings us to another point in President Buchanan’s letter of October 22, in which he mentions that Secretary Cobb, of his Cabinet, had without his knowledge suppressed the publication of certain letters in the “Washington Union.”  These were, as we learn elsewhere, the letters in which some of the Kansas pro-slavery leaders repeated their declaration of the hopelessness of any further contest to make Kansas a slave-State.  Why this secret suppression by Secretary Cobb?  There is but one plausible explanation of this whole chain of contradictions.  The conclusion is almost forced upon us that a Cabinet intrigue, of which the President was kept in ignorance, was being carried on, under the very eyes of Mr. Buchanan, by those whom he himself significantly calls “the extremists”—­a plot to supersede his own intentions and make him falsify his own declarations.  As in the case of similar intrigues by the same agents a few years later, he had neither the wit to perceive nor the will to resist.

  [Sidenote] Stanton, Philadelphia Speech, Feb. 8, 1858.

The protest of the people of the Territory against the extraordinary action of the Lecompton Convention almost amounted to a popular revolt.  This action opened a wide door to fraud, and invited Missouri over to an invasion of final and permanent conquest.  Governor Walker had quitted the Territory on his leave of absence, and Secretary Stanton was acting Governor.  “The people in great masses,” he says, “and the Legislature that had been elected, with almost a unanimous voice called upon me to convene the Legislature, in order that they might take such steps as they could to counteract the misfortune which they conceived was about to befall them in the adoption of this constitution,” As already stated, Stanton had come to Kansas with the current Democratic prejudices against the free-State party.  But his whole course had been frank, sincere, and studiously impartial, and the Oxford fraud had completely opened his eyes.  “I now discovered for the first time to my entire satisfaction why it was that the great mass of the people of the Territory had been dissatisfied with their government, and were ready to rebel and throw it off.”