Does any sane man live who believes that if Cuba was tendered to us tomorrow, with the full sanction of England and France, that this people would consent to receive and annex her?... There was a time when the North would have consented to annex Cuba, but the Nebraska wrong has forever rendered annexation impossible.
A revolution in Spain gave an opportunity for negotiations to purchase the island; but the suggestion that a few millions of money should be placed at the disposal of the Executive, during the recess of Congress, to be used in the Spanish-Cuban business, met no response;[73] while the "Ostend Manifesto" received no consideration whatever. The trouble was that the South had been moving with too much energy and too arrogantly. Her statesmen had undertaken to do everything at once. Had they been less aggressive, or more conciliatory and diplomatic, and concentrated their efforts on the acquisition of Cuba, they surely could have succeeded;[74] and would then have been in position to await the psychological moment to move the Kansas question. The Missouri Compromise was a "solemn covenant entered into by two opposing parties for the preservation of amicable relations." It was not sustained by any constitutional authority. Kansas Territory, therefore, might have been peacefully occupied by emigrants from Missouri and the Southern States, as Missouri had been, leaving, with confidence, the constitutionality of the restrictions against slavery, for future settlement by the courts.
The creation of the State of Kansas was a political proposition pure and simple. The amendment to the Nebraska bill creating Kansas Territory provided for a "complete Territorial government; including a legislature with two houses and thirty-nine members; although, at the time, there was not one white man in the Territory, except those intermarried with Indians and the few who were there under authority of Federal law.... The project fell upon Congress as suddenly and apparently as uncaused as a meteor from the political sky."[75]
The settlement of the Territory was promoted by the leaders of the pro-slavery and anti-slavery sections of the country. The South was spurred to activity by the extremity of its political and commercial necessities; while the North was impelled by a great moral sentiment, that had developed with time and changes which had occurred in public thought and in economic conditions. But the fact should not be lost sight of, that the ethical emotions which nourished this sentiment had their origin, or beginnings, in the unprofitable and unsatisfactory character of slave labor in that section. The Southern statesmen staked the entire stock of their political assets on the result in Kansas. The North already had a majority of one State, with the Territories, Minnesota and Oregon, waiting at the threshold of the Union for admission into the family of States. If the South lost Kansas, its political power and prestige would be destroyed; slavery would thereafter be dependent, in the Union, upon the mercy or charity of the aggressively hostile anti-slavery sentiment which it had too arrogantly aroused.
