It is our glory that, whilst other nations have extended their dominions by the sword, we have never acquired any territory except by fair purchase, or, as in the case of Texas, by the voluntary determination of a brave, kindred, and independent people to blend their destinies with our own. Even our acquisitions from Mexico form no exception. Unwilling to take advantage of the fortune of war against a sister republic, we purchased these possessions, under the treaty of peace, for a sum which was considered at the time a fair equivalent. Our past history forbids that we shall in the future acquire territory, unless this be sanctioned by the laws of justice and honor. Acting on this principle, no nation will have a right to interfere or to complain if, in the progress of events, we shall still further extend our possessions. Hitherto, in all our acquisitions, the people, under the protection of the American flag, have enjoyed civil and religious liberty, as well as equal and just laws, and have been contented, prosperous, and happy. Their trade with the rest of the world has rapidly increased, and thus every commercial nation has shared largely in their successful progress.

I shall now proceed to take the oath prescribed by the Constitution, whilst humbly invoking the blessing of Divine Providence on this great people.

In the selection of his cabinet, the President followed the long-established custom of making it a representation of the different portions of the Union, so far as might be consistent with a proper regard for personal qualifications for the different posts. The cabinet, which was confirmed by the Senate on the 6th day of March, 1857, consisted of Lewis Cass, of Michigan, Secretary of State; Howell Cobb, of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury; John B. Floyd, of Virginia, Secretary of War; Isaac Toucey, of Connecticut, Secretary of the Navy; Aaron V. Brown, of Tennessee, Postmaster General; Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior; and Jeremiah S. Black, of Pennsylvania, Attorney General. So far as was practicable within the limits of a selection which, according to invariable usage and sound policy was confined to the Democratic party, this cabinet was a fair representation of the Eastern, the Middle, the Western and the Southern States.

The state of the country, however, when this administration was organized, was ominous to its internal peace and welfare. The preceding administration of President Pierce had left a legacy of trouble to his successor in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Had it not been for this ill-advised step, the country might have reposed upon the settlement of all the slavery questions that was made by the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. How the flood-gates of sectional controversy were again opened by the repeal of the earlier settlement of 1820, and how this repeal tended to unsettle what had been happily settled in 1850, is a sad chapter in our political history.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was effected in the following manner: In the session of 1854, Senator Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, reported a bill for the establishment of a Territorial government in Nebraska. It did not touch the Missouri Compromise; and, being in the usual form, it would probably have been passed without much opposition, but for the intervention of a Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Dixon. He gave notice, on the 16th of January, that when the bill should be reached in its order, he would move a section repealing the Missouri Compromise, both as to Nebraska and all other Territories of the United States. Mr. Dixon was a Whig, and Mr. Douglas was a prominent and most energetic Democrat, who had long been an aspirant to the Presidency. Conceiving the idea that a new doctrine respecting the sovereign right of the people of a Territory to determine for themselves whether they would or would not have slavery while they were in the Territorial condition, would better reconcile both sections of the Union than the continuance of the Missouri Compromise, he introduced a substitute for the original bill, which, after dividing Nebraska into two Territories, calling one Nebraska and the other Kansas, annulled the Missouri Compromise in regard to these and all other Territories. This he called, “Non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States or Territories,” which his bill declared was the principle of the settlement of 1850, although that settlement had not only not invalidated the Missouri Compromise, but that Compromise had been expressly recognized in the case of Texas. Mr. Dixon expressed himself as perfectly satisfied with Mr. Douglas’s new bill, and the latter, being a man of great power, both as a debater and as a politician, carried his bill through the two Houses, and persuaded President Pierce to approve it. It was long and disastrously known as “the Kansas-Nebraska Act.”

Its discussion in Congress was attended with heats such as had not been witnessed for many years. It laid the foundation for the political success of the party then beginning to be known as the Republican, and it produced the hopeless disruption of the Democratic party when its nomination for the Presidency next after Mr. Buchanan’s was to be made. Proud, disdainful of the predictions made by others of the danger to the Union arising from his measure, confident in his own energies and his ability to unite the Democratic party in the South and in the North upon his principle of “non-intervention,” Mr. Douglas gained a momentary triumph at the expense of his own political future, of the future of his party, and of the peace of the Union. For a time, however, it seemed as if he had secured a following that would insure the acceptance of his principle. All the Southern Senators, Whigs and Democrats, with two exceptions,[[29]] and all the Northern Democratic Senators, with three exceptions,[[30]] voted for his bill. The Whig Senators from the North, and those who more distinctively represented the Northern anti-slavery, or “Free-soil” sentiment, voted against it; but the latter hailed it as a means that would consolidate the North into a great political organization, with freedom inscribed upon its banners. Mr. Buchanan, it will be remembered, was at this time in England.

He has said that although down to this period the anti-slavery party of the North had been the assailing party and kept the people of the South in constant irritation, yet, “in sustaining the repeal of the Missouri Compromise the Senators and Representatives of the Southern States became the aggressors themselves.”[[31]] And it was one of the worst features of this aggression that it was made under the lead of a Northern Democrat; for if the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a boon offered to the South, they could say that it was a boon offered from the North.[[32]]

The fatal effects of this measure were two-fold; first in unsettling what had been settled in 1850, and secondly in precipitating a struggle in Kansas as between the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery parties, which, although it was local, spread itself in opposite sympathies throughout the North and the South. The Compromise Measures of 1850 had settled every possible question in relation to slavery on which Congress could then or ever afterwards act.

Such was the general repose of the country upon these topics when President Pierce was inaugurated, that he congratulated the country upon the calm security now evinced by the public mind, and promised that it should receive no shock during his official term, if he could prevent it. But the shock came within two years, and it came because the repeal of the Missouri Compromise threw open again the whole question of slavery in the Territories, to remain an unending sectional controversy until it had divided one great national party, built up a new and sectional party, and finally rent the Union into a geographical array of section against section.

The more immediate and local effect remains to be described. Kansas at once became the theatre where the extreme men of both sections entered into a deadly conflict, the one party to make it a free, the other to make it a slaveholding Territory and State. Congress having abdicated its duty of fixing the character of the Territory by law, one way or the other, the beauty of Mr. Douglas’s principle of “non-intervention,” now become popularly known in the political jargon of the day as “squatter sovereignty,” had ample room for development. What one party could do, on this principle, the other could do. The Southern pro-slavery settler, or his sympathizer in the Southern State which he had left, could claim that his slaves were property in Kansas as much as in Missouri, or Tennessee, or Kentucky. The Northern anti-slavery settler, or his sympathizer in the Northern State from which he had come, could contend that slavery was local and confined to the States where it existed. Fierce war arose between the parties in their struggle for local supremacy; both parties were respectively upheld and supplied by their sympathizers in the near and in the distant States, North and South; scenes of bloodshed and rapine ensued; and the bitter fruits of opening a fine Territory to such a contest were reaped in an abundance that made sober men stand aghast at the spectacle.