The able and ambitious men who had come into power at the South were wielding the whole force of the national administration, and they wielded it with commanding ability and unflinching energy.

The Free-soil sentiment which so largely pervaded the ranks of the Northern Democracy had no representative in the cabinet, and a man of pronounced anti-slavery views was as severely proscribed in Washington as a Roundhead was in London after the coronation of Charles II.
The policy of maintaining an equality of slave States with free States was to be pursued, as it had already been from the foundation of the government, with unceasing vigilance and untiring energy.
The balancing of forces between the new States added to the Union had been so skillfully arranged, that for a long period two States were admitted at nearly the same time,--one from the South, and one from the North.

Thus Kentucky and Vermont, Tennessee and Ohio, Mississippi and Indiana, Alabama and Illinois, Missouri and Maine, Arkansas and Michigan, Florida and Iowa, came into the Union in pairs, not indeed at precisely the same moment in every case, but always with reference each to the other in the order named.

On the admission of Florida and Iowa, Colonel Benton remarked that "it seemed strange that two territories so different in age, so distant from each other, so antagonistic in natural features and political institutions, should ripen into States at the same time, and come into the Union by a single Act; but these very antagonisms -- that is, the antagonistic provisions on the subject of slavery-- made the conjunction, and gave to the two young States an inseparable admission." During the entire period from the formation of the Federal Government to the inauguration of Mr.Polk, the only variation from this twin birth of States--the one free, the other slave--was in the case of Louisiana, which was admitted in 1812, with no corresponding State from the North.

Of the original Thirteen States, seven had become free, and six maintained slavery.