They now ask admission into the
Union under this constitution, which is Republican in form. It is for
Congress to decide whether they will admit or reject the State which
has thus been created. For my own part I am decidedly in favor of its
admission and thus terminating the Kansas question."

[Sidenote] 1858.

The vote of January 4 against the constitution he declared to be
illegal because it was "held after the Territory had been prepared for
admission into the Union as a sovereign State, and when no authority
existed in the Territorial Legislature which could possibly destroy
its existence or change its character." His own inconsistency was
lightly glossed over. "For my own part, when I instructed Governor
Walker in general terms, in favor of submitting the constitution to
the people, I had no object in view except the all-absorbing question
of slavery.... I then believed, and still believe, that under the
organic act, the Kansas Convention were bound to submit this
all-important question of slavery to the people. It was never,
however, my opinion that independently of this act they would have
been bound to submit any portion of the constitution to a popular
vote, in order to give it validity."

To the public at large, the central point of interest in this special
message, however, was the following dogmatic announcement by the
President: "It has been solemnly adjudged by the highest judicial
tribunal known to our laws that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of
the Constitution of the United States. Kansas is, therefore, at this
moment as much a slave-State as Georgia or South Carolina. Without
this, the equality of the sovereign States composing the Union would
be violated, and the use and enjoyment of a territory acquired by the
common treasure of all the States would be closed against the people
and the property of nearly half the members of the Confederacy.
Slavery can, therefore, never be prohibited in Kansas except by means
of a constitutional provision and in no other manner can this be
obtained so promptly, if a majority of the people desire it, as by
admitting it into the Union under its present constitution."

In the light of subsequent history this extreme pro-slavery programme
was not only wrong in morals and statesmanship, but short-sighted and
foolhardy as a party policy. But to the eyes of President Buchanan
this latter view was not so plain. The country was apparently in the
full tide of a pro