I was present when the oath of office was administered to Mr. Buchanan, on the 4th of March, 1857. With my strong sympathy for the Free State people of Kansas, I hoped and believed that he would give some assurance that the pledges made for him in the canvass would be carried out, but the statement in his inaugural address, that the difference of opinion in respect to the power of the people of a territory to decide the question of slavery for themselves would be speedily and finally settled, as a judicial question, by the Supreme Court of the United States, in a case then pending before it, naturally, excited suspicion and distrust. It was regarded as a change of position, a new device in the interest of slavery. In two days after the inauguration, Chief Justice Taney delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, as to the status of negroes in the United States. He said: "They had, for more than a century before, been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit." He said negroes "were not intended to be included in the word 'citizens' in the constitution, and therefore could claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to the citizens of the United States;" and announced as the opinion of the court that the Missouri Compromise act was not warranted by the constitution and was therefore void. These declarations were in no sense necessary to the decision of the case before the court, as it was held that Dred Scott was a resident of Missouri and subject as a slave to the laws of that state. Justices McLean and Curtis dissented from the decision of the court, and in elaborate opinions refuted, as I think, every position of the Chief Justice. Thus the Kansas question became a political question in the Supreme Court. At once the south rejected the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and demanded, as a constitutional right, that slaves moved into a territory must be protected like other property, whether the people of the territory wish it or not. This was the first time in our history when this great tribunal entered into the political arena. Its action encouraged the south, but produced a strong feeling of resentment in the north, and widened the breach between the two great sections of the country.