new President, Buchanan, and his new
Cabinet, proceeded to its treatment with the utmost caution. The
subject was fraught with difficulties not of easy solution. The South,
to retain her political supremacy, or even her equality, needed more
slave-States to furnish additional votes in the United States Senate.
To make a slave-State of Kansas, the Missouri Compromise had been
repealed, and a bogus legislature elected and supported by the
successive Missouri invasions and the guerrilla war of 1856. All these
devices had, however, confessedly failed of their object. Northern
emigration and anti-slavery sentiment were clearly in possession of
Kansas, and a majority of voters stood ready upon fair occasion to
place her in the column of free-States. It had become a game on the
chess-board of national politics. The moving pieces stood in Missouri
and Kansas, but the players sat in Washington. In reality it was a
double game. There was plot and under-plot. Beneath the struggle
between the free-States and the slave-States were the intrigue and
deception carried on between Northern Democrats and Southern
Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska act was a double-tongued statute, and
the Cincinnati platform a Janus-faced banner. Momentary victory was
with the Southern Democrats, for they had secured the nomination and
election of President Buchanan--"a Northern man with Southern
principles."

[Sidenote] Walker to Cass, July 15, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No. 8,
1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. I., p. 32.

[Sidenote] Walker to Cass, Dec. 15, 1857. Ibid., p. 122.

Determined to secure whatever prestige could be derived from high
qualification and party influence, Buchanan tendered the vacant
governorship of Kansas to his intimate personal and political friend,
Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi, a man of great ability and national
fame, who had been Senator and Secretary of the Treasury. Walker,
realizing fully the responsibility and danger of the trust, after
repeated refusals finally accepted upon two distinct conditions: first,
that General Harney should be "put in special command in Kansas with a
large body of troops, and especially of dragoons and a battery," and
retained there subject to his military directions until the danger
was over; and second, that he "should advocate the submission of the
constitution to the vote of the people for ratification or rejection."

[Sidenote] March 7, 1856. June 25, 1856.

This latter had now become a v