In the light of subsequent history this extreme pro-slavery programme was not only wrong in morals and statesmanship, but short-sighted and foolhardy as a party policy.  But to the eyes of President Buchanan this latter view was not so plain.  The country was apparently in the full tide of a pro-slavery reaction.  He had not only been elected President, but the Democratic party had also recovered its control of Congress.  The presiding officer of each branch was a Southerner.  Out of 64 members of the Senate, 39 were Democrats, 20 Republicans, and five Americans or Know-Nothings.  Of the 237 members of the House, 131 were Democrats, 92 Republicans, and 14 Americans.  Here was a clear majority of fourteen in the upper and twenty-five in the lower House.  This was indeed no longer the formidable legislative power which repealed the Missouri Compromise, but it seemed perhaps a sufficient force to carry out the President’s recommendation.  His error was in forgetting that this apparent popular indorsement was secured to him and his party by means of the double construction placed upon the Nebraska bill and the Cincinnati platform, by the caucus bargain between the leaders of the South and the leaders of the North.  The moment had come when this unnatural alliance needed to be exposed and in part repudiated.

The haste with which the Southern leaders advanced step by step, forced every issue, and were now pushing their allies to the wall was, to say the least, bad management, but it grew logically out of their situation.  They were swimming against the stream.  The leading forces of civilization, population, wealth, commerce, intelligence, were bearing them down.  The balance of power was lost.  Already there were sixteen free-States to fifteen slave-States.  Minnesota and Oregon, inevitably destined also to become free, were applying for admission to the Union.

  [Sidenote] Official Manifesto, Oct. 8, 1754.

  [Sidenote] Senator Brown to Adams, June 18, 1856.  Greeley, “Am. 
  Conflict,” Vol.  I., p. 278.

  [Sidenote] Official proceedings, Pamphlet.

Still, the case of the South was not hopeless.  Kansas was apparently within their grasp.  Existing law provided for the formation and admission of four additional States to be carved out of Texas, which would certainly become slave-States.  Then there remained the possible division of California, and a race for the possession of New Mexico and Arizona.  Behind all, or, more likely, before all except Kansas, in the order of desired events, was the darling ambition of President Buchanan, the annexation of Cuba.  As United States Minister to England he had publicly declared that if Spain refused to sell us that coveted island we should be justified in wresting it from her by force; as Presidential candidate he had confidentially avowed, amid the first blushes of his new honor, “If I can be instrumental in settling the slavery question upon the terms I have mentioned, and then add Cuba