During the debates in Congress on this subject, Senator Sumner happening to make a strong speech in favour of the anti-slavery party in Kansas, was brutally assaulted in his place in the Senate by a slave-owner called Brooks, a senator from South Carolina. “To me,” said Sir George Cornewall Lewis of this outrage, writing to Sir Edmund Head, “it seems the first blow in a civil war,” and it was. In 1857 Mr. Buchanan was elected President. The Supreme Court of the United States, in the famous Dred Scott case, decided that negroes had no rights save those which the Government gave them, and that Congress could no more prohibit a citizen from taking his slave into any State, than it could prohibit him from taking there any kind of property whose safe possession was guaranteed to him by the Constitution.[125] This, of course, intensified the struggle between North and South for the control of Nebraska and “bleeding Kansas.” Southern slave-owners saw that they must have an outlet for their surplus slave population. If they lost Kansas and Nebraska they must seize Cuba or Mexico, or both, or secede from a Union in which the Slave States would be in a minority, and at the mercy of the Free States. The struggle went on till, in 1859, Kansas adopted, by a majority of 4,000, the Wyandotte Constitution, prohibiting slavery. President Buchanan seems to have prepared for the worst, because he now began secretly to pour munitions of war and arms, which were the common property of the North and the South, into Southern strongholds. The Democratic party split into a Southern and a Northern wing over the Dred Scott case, so that in November, 1859, the Republicans elected Mr. Abraham Lincoln as President, pledged to maintain the principle that freedom was the normal condition of the Territories, which Congress must preserve and defend--though slavery in the old Slave States was not assailed as a domestic institution.