5. Then he was a southern man, and all our masters must be from the South, or of it, devoted to its peculiar institution. If he had been born in Barnstable county, and owned a little patch of yellow sand at Cape Cod, and had the freeman's hatred of slavery, even Churubusco and Buena Vista would not have given him the votes of the Convention, and his war-horse might have lived till this day, he would not have carried his master to the presidency. He was a slaveholder, as seven Presidents had been before him, holding office for eight-and-forty years. There are some men at the North, chiefly in the country towns, who think it is not altogether right for a man to steal his brother; such men were to be propitiated. So it was diligently rumored abroad in the North, that the candidate was "opposed to slavery," that he would "probably emancipate his slaves as soon as he was elected." I am told that some persons who heard such a story, actually believed it; I think nobody who told it believed any such thing. The fact that he was a slaveholder, that he had lately purchased one hundred and fourteen men, women, and children, and kept them at hard work for his advantage, showed the value of such a story; and the opposite statement, publicly and industriously circulated at the South, that he loved slavery, desired its extension, and hated the Wilmot Proviso, shows the honesty of some of the men at the North, who, knowing these facts, sought to keep them secret. These seem to have been the chief reasons which procured his nomination and election. It is easy to see that such a man, though as honest as Washington, must be eminently unfit for the high office of President of the United States. He knew little or nothing of the political history of the country, or of the political questions then up for solution; little or nothing of the political men. He had the honesty to confess it. He declared that he was not fit for the office, not acquainted with the political measures of the day, and only consented to be brought from his obscurity, when great men told him he was the only man that could "save the Union." He was no statesman, and knew nothing of politics, less than the majority of the more cultivated mechanics, merchants and farmers. He was a soldier, and knew something of fighting, at least of fighting Indians and Mexicans. If you should take a man of the common abilities, intellectual and moral, the common education, a farmer from Northfield, a skipper from Provincetown, a jobber from Boston, a bucket-maker from Hingham, and appoint him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, with the duty of selecting all his associate Judges, I think he would be about as competent for the office as General Taylor for the post he was elected to. In such a case as I have supposed, the new "Judge" must depend on other men, who will tell him what to do; his only safety would be in relying on their advice. Then they would be the Chief Justice, not he.