During the half century that intervened between the War of 1812 and the Civil War of 1861 the policy of the United States government was decided largely by men who came from south of the Mason and Dixon line. The Southern whites,--class-conscious rulers with an institution (slavery) to defend,--acted like any other ruling class under similar circumstances. They favored Southward expansion which meant more territory in which slavery might be established. The Southerners were looking for a place in the sun where slavery, as an institution, might flourish for the profit and power of the slave-holding class. Their most effective move in this direction was the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of territory following the Mexican War. An insistent drive for the annexation of Cuba was cut short by the Civil War. Southern sentiment had supported the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Florida Purchase of 1819. From Jefferson's time Southern statesmen had been advocating the purchase of Cuba. Filibustering expeditions were fitted out in Southern ports with Cuba as an objective; agitation was carried on, inside and outside of Congress; between 1850 and 1861 the acquisition of Cuba was the question of the day. It was an issue in the Campaign of 1853. In 1854 the American ministers to London, France and Madrid met at the direction of the State Department and drew up a document (the "Ostend Manifesto") dealing with the future of Cuba. McMaster summarizes the Manifesto in these words: "The United States ought to buy Cuba because of its nearness to our coast; because it belonged naturally to that great group of states of which the Union was the providential nursery; because it commanded the mouth of the Mississippi whose immense and annually growing trade must seek that way to the ocean, and because the Union could never enjoy repose, could never be secure, till Cuba was within its boundaries." (Vol. viii, pp. 185-6.) If Spain refused to sell Cuba it was suggested that the United States should take it. The Ostend Manifesto was rejected by the State Department, but it was a good picture of the imperialistic sentiment at that time abroad among certain elements in the United States. The Cuban issue featured in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1858. It was hotly discussed by Congress in 1859. Only twenty years had passed since the United States, by force of arms, had taken from Mexico territory that she coveted. Now it was proposed to appropriate territory belonging to Spain. The outbreak of hostilities deferred the project, and when the Civil War was over, the slave power was shattered. From that time forward national policy was guided by the leaders of the new industrial North. The process of this change was fearfully wasteful. The shifting of power from the old régime to the new cost more lives and a greater expenditure of wealth than all of the wars of conquest that had been fought during the preceding half century.