for expansion through Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi to the vast territory southwest beyond the Mississippi river, caring little for Kansas, although its southern half was invitingly fertile. The political situation in these States did not at any time require the expedient of agitation over the wealth or the woes of Kansas. The Democratic party in those States, thoroughly Union, and led by Mason, Toombs, Stephens, Cobb, Jefferson Davis and the like, was content to have the policy of the three successive Northern presidents, Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan, the views of Webster and Clay, and the doctrine of the "Settlement" carried out.
The situation in 1854 does not make it reasonable for the historian to record that these States or their leaders de sired any sectional conflict over Kansas, much less that they desired disunion. But the political situation in the States North was somewhat different.
Whig leaders North, unnecessarily disheartened by the defeat of 1852, and suffering from the inroads made by the Free Soil faction, threw overboard the great economic questions, on which they might have gained the victory in 1856, and many surrendered to the spirit of sectionalism. Northern Democratic leaders, being hard pressed with charges that they were the vassals of the slave power, fell here and there out of the ranks, or else adopted a line of argument as to Kansas and other territories, designed to show that there could not be any further extension of slavery. The agitation thus be came strictly a feature in Northern politics, distressful to the administration of Pierce, and fatal to that of Buchanan.
Evidently the Southern States had no power to arrest these political developments. They could not stop either the Kansas war nor prevent the organization of the elements at that time opposing the administration which had come into power on the popularity of the Compromise of 1850. The question of the time as it appeared to
