CHAPTER II.
A New Era Skirmishes before the Civil War - The Democratic Party - The Dred Scott Decision - Action of the Supreme Court of the United States - Early Efforts to Restrict Slavery - Slaves in England - The Status of Slavery Here - President Buchanan's Course Foreshadowed - Civil War in Kansas and Civil Government There Lecompton Constitution Adopted and Rejected - Admission of Kansas as a State - A judicial Decision Practically Reversed - Reopening of the African Slave - Trade and Action Concerning It Working of the Fugitive - Slave Law - Action of State Legislatures.
When James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, was inaugurated the fifteenth President of the United States on the 4th of March, 1857, and chose, for his constitutional advisers, Lewis Cass, Secretary of State; Howell Cobb, Secretary of the Treasury; John B. Floyd, Secretary of War; Isaac Toucey, Secretary of the Navy; Jacob Thompson, Secretary of the Interior; Aaron V. Brown, Postmaster-General, and Jeremiah S. Black, Attorney General, a new era in the history of the United States was begun. It was the beginning of a great political and social revolution in our republic which entirely and permanently changed the industrial aspects in many of the States of the Union.
It was during the administration of Mr. Buchanan that the preliminary skirmishes, moral and physical, which immediately preceded the great Civil War, occurred. Both parties were then putting on their armor and preparing their weapons for the mighty struggle. The political organization by which the new President had been elected had, for some time, coalesced with the friends and supporters of the slave labor system in their efforts not only to extend the public domain so as to allow the almost indefinite expansion of their cherished institution, but to make it national. That coalition and sympathy were manifested in various ways. The two wings of the Democratic party (one of them leaning toward an anti-slavery policy and called the "Free-Soil Democracy") had been reconciled, and worked together in the national convention at Cincinnati in June, 1856, which nominated Mr. Buchanan for the Presidency. In their resolutions, put forth as a platform of principles, they approved the invasion and usurpation of Walker, in Nicaragua, as efforts of the people of Central America "to regenerate that portion of the continent which covers the passage across the interoceanic isthmus." They approved the doctrine of the "Ostend Manifesto", by resolving that "the Democratic party were in favor of the acquisition of Cuba", and Mr. Buchanan was chosen to be their standard bearer because of his known sympathy with these movements for the extension of the area and perpetuation of the slave system. Senator A. G. Brown of Mississippi, one of the committee appointed to call upon Mr. Buchanan and officially inform him of his nomination, wrote to a friend, saying: "In my judgment Mr. Buchanan is as worthy of Southern confidence and Southern votes as ever Mr. Calhoun was. "
One of the most vitally important skirmishes before the Civil War actually began occurred at about the time of Mr. Buchanan's accession to the Presidency of the Republic. It was of a moral and not of a physical nature, and is known in our judicial history as "the Dred Scott case."
Dred Scott was a young negro slave of Dr. Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, living in Missouri. When the latter was ordered to Rock Island, in Illinois, in 1834, he took Scott with him. There Major Taliaferro, of the army, had a feminine slave, and when the two masters were transferred to Fort Snelling (now in Minnesota) next year, the two slaves were married with the consent of the
