On the second day of February, 1858, President Buchanan transmitted to Congress the Lecompton Constitution, “received from J. Calhoun, Esq.,” and “duly certified by himself.”  The President’s accompanying special message argues that the organic law of the Territory conferred the essential rights of an enabling act; that the free-State party stood in the attitude of willful and chronic revolution; that their various refusals to vote were a sufficient bar to complaint and objection; that the several steps in the creation and work of the Lecompton Convention were regular and legal.  “The people of Kansas have, then, ‘in their own way,’ and in strict accordance with the organic act, framed a constitution and State government, have submitted the all-important question of slavery to the people, and have elected a governor, a member to represent them in Congress, members of the State Legislature, and other State officers.  They now ask admission into the Union under this constitution, which is Republican in form.  It is for Congress to decide whether they will admit or reject the State which has thus been created.  For my own part I am decidedly in favor of its admission and thus terminating the Kansas question.”

  [Sidenote] 1858.

The vote of January 4 against the constitution he declared to be illegal because it was “held after the Territory had been prepared for admission into the Union as a sovereign State, and when no authority existed in the Territorial Legislature which could possibly destroy its existence or change its character.”  His own inconsistency was lightly glossed over.  “For my own part, when I instructed Governor Walker in general terms, in favor of submitting the constitution to the people, I had no object in view except the all-absorbing question of slavery....  I then believed, and still believe, that under the organic act, the Kansas Convention were bound to submit this all-important question of slavery to the people.  It was never, however, my opinion that independently of this act they would have been bound to submit any portion of the constitution to a popular vote, in order to give it validity.”

To the public at large, the central point of interest in this special message, however, was the following dogmatic announcement by the President:  “It has been solemnly adjudged by the highest judicial tribunal known to our laws that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States.  Kansas is, therefore, at this moment as much a slave-State as Georgia or South Carolina.  Without this, the equality of the sovereign States composing the Union would be violated, and the use and enjoyment of a territory acquired by the common treasure of all the States would be closed against the people and the property of nearly half the members of the Confederacy.  Slavery can, therefore, never be prohibited in Kansas except by means of a constitutional provision and in no other manner can this be obtained so promptly, if a majority of the people desire it, as by admitting it into the Union under its present constitution.”