Brooks also, for remarks in the Senate characterizing the assault, challenged Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, but the latter declined the challenge because he "regarded duelling as the lingering relic of a barbarous civilization, which the law of the country has branded as a crime."(86) So threatening, then, was the attitude of the Southern members of both Senate and House that Senators Wade of Ohio, Chandler of Michigan, and Cameron of Pennsylvania made a compact to resent any insult from a Southerner by a challenge to fight.(87) A last attempt was made in Buchanan's administration, pending the Kansas agitation, to buy and annex Cuba in the interest of the slave power. It was then a province of Spain. Buchanan was both dull and perverse in obeying the demands of his party, especially on the slavery issue. In his Annual Message of 1858 he expressed satisfaction that the Kansas question no longer gave the country trouble. He also expressed gratitude to "Almighty Providence" that it no longer threatened the peace of the country, and congratulated himself over his course in relation to the Lecompton policy, saying, "it afforded him heartfelt satisfaction." He, in the same message, set forth his anxiety to acquire Cuba, assigning as a reason that it was "the only spot in the civilized world where the African slave trade is tolerated." Cuba was wanted simply to make more slave States to extend the waning slave power, and thus to offset the incoming new free States, which then seemed to the observing as inevitable. Buchanan suggested that circumstances might arise where the law of self-preservation might call on us to acquire Cuba by force, thus affirming the policy set forth in the Ostend Manifesto, prepared and signed by Mason, Soule, and himself four years earlier. Slidell of Louisiana, from the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate, promptly reported a bill appropriating $30,000,000 to be used by the President to obtain Cuba; and it soon transpired that Southern Senators were willing to make the sum $120,000,000. The introduction of the bill caused a sensation in Spain, and her Cortes voted at once to support her King in maintaining the integrity of the Spanish dominions. A most violent debate ensued in Congress, reopening afresh the slavery question. The bill was antagonized by the friends of a homestead bill--"A question of homes; of lands for the landless freemen." The friends of the latter bill denominated the Cuba bill a "question of slaves for the slaveholders." Toombs of Georgia, ever a fire-eater, save in war,(88) vehemently denounced the opponents of the Cuba appropriation and the friends of "lands for the landless" as the "shivering in the wind of men of particular localities." This brought to his feet Senator Wade of Ohio, impetuous to meet attacks from all quarters, who exclaimed: