A History of the American People

slaver, William H. Seward (1801-72), as too extreme, and picked John Charles Fremont (1813-
90), a South Carolina adventurer who had eloped with the daughter of old Senator Benton and
then had innumerable near-death escapes in California, including a capital conviction for mutiny
quashed by President Polk. The Republican slogan was Free Soil, Free Speech and Fremont.' The Democratic Party, rejecting Pierce as a sure loser, and Douglas as too all-things-to-all-men, picked James Buchanan, who concentrated on taking all the slave states and as much of the rest as he could. Old Fillmore, with Jackson's son-in-law Donelson as his running mate, popped up from the past as a splitter. That did for Fremont. So Buchanan, with a fairly united Democratic Party behind him, carried all the South plus New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and California, making 174 college voters, against Fremont's 114. Buchanan was elected on a minority (45.3 percent) of the vote but his plurality over Fremont was wide, 1,838,169 to 1,341,264. The new President was at heart a weak man, and a vacillating one, but he was not out of touch with the combination of imperialist and Southern opinion which, well led, would have ruled out any prospect of coercion of the South by the North. Whatever he said in public, Buchanan sympathized with the idea of adding new states to the South, even if slavers. In his message to Congress, January 7, 1858, Buchanan criticized Walker's filibustering in Nicaragua not because it was wrong in itself but because it was impolitic andimpeded the destiny of our race to spread
itself over the continent of North America, and this at no distant day, should events be permitted
to take their natural course.' He followed this up by asking Congress to buy Cuba, despite the
fact that the Spanish were demanding at least $150 million for it (the Republicans blocked the
plan). America had absorbed what was once Spanish-speaking territory of millions of square
miles in California and Texas: why not the whole of Mexico and Central America? That was all
part of the North American Continent,' to which the US wasprovidentially entitled' by its
Manifest Destiny.
Moreover, the price of slaves was rising all the time, despite the efforts of the Virginia slave-
farms to produce more, and this in turn strengthened demands for a resumption of the slave-
trade. Slave-smuggling was growing, and it was well known, and trumpeted in the South, that
merchants in New York and Baltimore bought slaves cheap on the West African coast, and then
landed them on islands off Georgia and other Southern states. So why not repeal the 1807 Act
and legalize the traffic? That was the demand of the governor of South Carolina in 1856, and the
Vicksburg Commercial Convention of 1859 approved a motion resolving that all laws, state or federal, prohibiting the African slave trade, ought to be repealed.' The first step, it was argued, was to have blacks captured from slave-ships stopped and searched by the US Navy-the current practice was to send them, free, to Liberia, which most of them did not like-sent to the South and apprenticed' to planters with good records. Representative William L. Yancey of Alabama
asked: If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil or Africa, and carry them there?' If blacks would rather be slaves in the South than free men in Liberia, might it not be that other African blacks would prefer to come to the South, as slaves, rather than remain in theDark Continent,' where their lives were
so short and cheap?
Southerners argued that to take a black from Africa and set him up in comfort on a plantation
was the equivalent, allowing for racial differences, of allowing a penniless European peasant free
entry and allowing him, in a few years, to buy his own farm. The Dred Scott Case, by declaring
the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act together opened up
enormous new opportunities for setting up slave-plantations and ranches, and therefore increased