slaveholders and non-slaveholders, without the superintending and controlling authority of Congress to prevent such a conflict by determining the character of the Territory one way or the other. As he could not remove the Missouri settlement without attacking the constitutional power of Congress to legislate as it might see fit on the condition of a Territory, he boldly determined to make that attack, and to put in the place of the authority of Congress the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” as a substitute for Congressional legislation on the relations of master and slave. When this ill-advised legislation, which tended in the most direct manner to concentrate into political organization the Northern dislike of slavery, received the sanction of the President, General Pierce, on the 30th of May, 1854, Mr. Buchanan was out of the country. He never approved of it, and had he been at home, it is quite certain that it would have encountered his strenuous opposition. Turning now aside from the history of these successive settlements, and the modes in which they were unsettled, in order to appreciate the condition of feeling between the two sections of the Union at the time when the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency was effected exclusively by the electoral votes of the free States, the reader should learn something of the history of the anti-slavery agitation in the North; something of the effort to extend the political power of the slave States as a barrier against anticipated encroachments upon Southern rights; and something of the causes which led to the assertion of the supposed right of State secession from the Union, as a remedy against dangers apprehended to be in store for the people of the South.