The first session of the Thirty-fifth Congress began on the 7th of December, 1857. President Buchanan's first message was largely concerned with the affairs of Kansas. He spoke of the framers of the Topeka Constitution as a "revolutionary organization," and said that the Lecompton Constitution was the work of the lawfully constituted authorities. He conceded that the submission clause of the Lecompton instrument fell short of his own intentions and expectations, but insisted that the slavery question was the only matter of dispute and that that was actually submitted to the popular vote. Trumbull was the first Senator to expose these unfounded assumptions, and this he did in a brief argument as soon as the reading of the message was finished. He showed, in the first place, that the Topeka Constitution was no whit more "revolutionary" or irregular than the Lecompton one, and one of the authorities whom he cited to sustain his contention was Buchanan himself, who, in a parallel case, had contended that the territorial legislature of Michigan had no authority to call a convention to frame a state constitution, and that any such proceeding was "an act of usurpation." This was not necessarily conclusive as to anybody but Buchanan. Yet in another case cited, that of Arkansas, where a territorial legislature was considering an act for the calling of a convention to frame a state constitution and where the governor had asked instructions from President Jackson as to his duty in the premises, the Attorney-General had held that such an act of the Legislature would be without authority and absolutely void. (This case had been cited by Douglas the previous year, in an argument against the Topeka Constitution.) The only regular proceeding was for Congress to pass an enabling act, on such terms and conditions as it might prescribe, under which the people might form a constitution preparatory to admission to the Union. Any other mode of accomplishing the same result, whether initiated by a popular assembly, as at Topeka, or by the legislature, as at Lecompton, was in the nature of a petition which Congress might respond to favorably, and thus legalize, or not. Neither of these modes of beginning had any higher authority than the other. Therefore, the underpinning of President Buchanan's first argument was knocked out by two citations of authority which he could not controvert. His second argument, that the slavery clause in the Lecompton Constitution, the only thing in controversy, was submitted to the popular vote, was easily demolished. The submission clause, said Mr. Trumbull, "amounts simply to giving the free white people of Kansas a right to determine the condition of a few negroes hereafter to be brought into the state, and nothing more; the condition of those now there cannot be touched."