d have seen the
problem and his duty.

But Pierce was not a great leader. In the make-up of his Cabinet he
chose William L. Marcy, of New York, for Secretary of State, James
Campbell, of Pennsylvania, for Postmaster-General, and Caleb Cushing, of
Massachusetts, for Attorney-General, all of whom were close political
allies of the South. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, became Secretary
of War, and James C. Dobbin, of North Carolina, Secretary of the Navy.
Both of these were extreme pro-slavery men. From the West, James
Guthrie, of Kentucky, and Robert McClelland, of Michigan, were taken
into the President's Council, the one to be Secretary of the Treasury
and the other the head of the Department of the Interior. Although
Douglas had been the strongest candidate for the nomination for the
Presidency before the recent Democratic Convention, neither he nor any
of his friends was selected. Nor did it seem wise to those who were then
shaping the destinies of the country to conciliate the still powerful
anti-slavery element of the East.

Looking backwards the new Administration found three lines of procedure
open to it, all suggested by President Polk in his later messages to
Congress. One of these was the closer attachment of California to the
rest of the country, another was the purchase of Cuba as a makeweight to
the growing Northwest, and the third was the rapid expansion of American
commerce by federal subsidies to shipping and the opening of new
channels of trade.

To carry into effect the first of these, James Gadsden, an able railroad
president of South Carolina, was sent to Mexico to purchase a large
strip of land lying along the southern border of New Mexico and thus
make easy the building of a national railway from Memphis to San
Francisco, for the lowest passes over the Rocky Mountains were in this
region. Gadsden returned in the autumn successful. For $10,000,000 he
had secured 50,000 square miles of territory, and the way was open for
the Government to lay its plans for the greatest undertaking ever
proposed by the most latitudinarian politicians. Davis, hitherto an
extreme States-rights leader and disciple of Calhoun, worked out the
program. The constitutional authority for building a Pacific railroad
was deduced from the "war powers" of the Federal Government, and, though
it was not definitely stated that the road should pass through the
recent annexation, it was commonly understood that such was the purpose