of the President and that the lower South was to be the economic and
social beneficiary of the great improvement. Arkansas, Texas, and
California were willing and anxious to build the parts of the road that
passed through their territory. With the exception of a group of
Gulf-city representatives and some of the up-country Democrats of the
older South, the leaders of the party approved the plan, and Pierce made
the Pacific railroad the burden of his first annual message to Congress.
Congress voted the money for the preliminary survey of five routes to
the Pacific, and confided the work to Jefferson Davis, the recognized
leader of the Administration. The people of the country, long familiar
with the arguments of Asa Whitney and others in favor of such an
undertaking, made no objection, though men of political foresight saw
the far-reaching purposes of the scheme.

To effect the second object of the Democratic program, the purchase of
Cuba, Pierre Soule, of Louisiana, was sent to Spain. Soule was one of
the most ardent of Southern expansionists, and his mission was not
relished at Madrid any more than it was approved by conservative
Eastern Democrats. In support of the new Spanish Minister, John Y.
Mason, of Virginia, and James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, both former
members of the Polk Cabinet, were sent as Ministers to France and
England respectively. Soule made little progress till the Black Warrior,
an American coasting vessel, was seized in 1854 by the Spanish
authorities in Havana and searched in the expectation of finding
evidence that the people of the United States were still assisting the
Cuban insurrectionists. No proof was discovered, and the people of the
country, especially those of the South, were greatly excited; for a time
it seemed that war would ensue. Davis and Soule pressed the case upon
the President, at the risk of war and perhaps in the hope that war would
follow and that thus Cuba, so long coveted, would fall into the lap of
the United States. But Marcy, though ambitious of annexing Cuba, was
hard pressed by Eastern public opinion, and he persuaded Pierce to
recall his hasty minister. This was not done, however, until the three
ministers concerned had met at Ostend in the autumn of 1855 and
published to the world the manifesto which declared it to be the purpose
of their Government not to allow any other European country to get
possession of Cuba, and which further stated that the United States wa