Last Best Hope of Earth

Tag: Robert Walker

  • The Lecompton Constitution

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    Constitution Hall in Lecompton, Kansas.

    Following the violence in Kansas known as Bleeding Kansas, there was a question of whether the territory would be admitted as a free state or slave state. After taking office in 1857, President James Buchanan appointed Robert J. Walker of Pennsylvania to be governor of Kansas. Governor Walker wrote a letter to President Buchanan, stating “that the actual bona fide residents of the territory of Kansas, by a fair and regular vote, unaffected by fraud or violence, must be permitted, in adopting their State Constitution, to decide for themselves what shall be their social institutions.” Walker to Buchanan, March 26, 1857, in Kansas State Historical Society Transactions, V (1891-1896), 290 (italics in original). Even with such a pronouncement regarding the nature of an election, no one knew how Kansans would vote on the issue of slavery or how soon Kansas would become a state. (more…)

  • Manifest Destiny

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    The Democratic Review Magazine.

    While many Americans would come to embrace manifest destiny, the idea that America would achieve its imperial destiny and dominate the continent, it was not a politician or president who coined the term. Rather, it was coined in 1845 in New York’s Democratic Review magazine. See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: Transformation of America, 1815-1848, 702-03.

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  • Election of 1844: Democratic Party Platform

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    Robert Walker. By: Mathew Brady.

    As part of the Democratic platform for the Election of 1844, the Democrats incorporated their positions on “strict construction, banking, and congressional noninterference with slavery.” Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: Transformation of America, 1815-1848, 683. However, the Democrats took things one step further.

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