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legislate upon the subject. Buchanan of the interference of the United States gave to President Van Buren the same to secure the Southern slave States from uncompromising political support that so dangerous a neighborhood of free he had given to his predecessor.

On the change of policy effected by President Tyler, after the death of Harrison, Buchanan rallied to the support of the administration; he advocated the recognition of the independence of Texas, as he subsequently did its admission into the Union and the consequent war with Mexico. Under President Polk he became secretary of state, and at the expiration of the Presidential term retired to private life. He, however, used his great political influence in opposition to the Wilmot proviso, and in favor of an extension to the Pacific Ocean of the Missouri Compromise line of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes north. On the accession of Pierce to the Presidency, Buchanan was appointed ambassador to Great Britain. It was while thus serving that he joined with the United States minister to Paris, and Pierre Soulé, the minister to Madrid, in forming the notable Ostend Conference, the object of which was to induce Spain to sell Cuba. A memorandum of the proceedings of the conference was published, and has been dignified with the title of a protocol. This set forth the importance of Cuba, commercially and defensively, to the United States; the advantage to Spain in consenting to receive compensation for a possession the prolonged tenure of which was so uncertain, and the necessity-in case the island should fall under the control, like St. Domingo, of its African population

negroes.

Mr. Buchanan returned to the United States in the spring of 1856, and in the following June was unanimously nominated, by the Democratic Convention at Cincinnati, candidate for President. In November he was elected by the electoral vote of nineteen States. Upon his accession to office there was a general willingness to concede to him a disposition to repress sectional differences and to administer the Government with a national spirit. His administration, however, served only to reinvigorate factious dispute, and the Republican party attacked him with great animosity for his partisan efforts to secure the admission of Kansas as a slave State.

The most momentous event, however, during Buchanan's administration, was the secession of six States from the Union. This will always give him an historic importance, and serve to make his character and conduct subjects of the deepest interest to the investigator of the causes of the civil war initiated during his Presidency.

"That Buchanan could have checked the fatal movement [the rebellion], no one can affirm; but that it was his duty to make the effort, few will deny. That he did not do so, is attributed by some to corrupt connivance with the conspirators who shared his counsels; by some, to the timidity of enfeebled age; and by others, to the conviction that neither right nor expediency would justify an

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