Of the fifteen that were added to the Union, prior to the annexation of Texas, eight were slave, and seven were free; so that, when Mr.
Polk took the oath of office, the Union consisted of twenty-eight States, equally divided between slave-holding and free.

So nice an adjustment had certainly required constant watchfulness and the closest calculation of political forces.

It was in pursuit of this adjustment that the admission of Louisiana was secured, as an evident compensation for the loss which had accrued to the slave- holding interest in the unequal though voluntary partition of the Old Thirteen between North and South.
The more rapid growth of the free States in population made the contest for the House of Representatives, or for a majority in the Electoral college, utterly hopeless to the South; but the constitutional equality of all the States in the Senate enabled the slave interest to defeat any hostile legislation, and to defeat also any nominations by the President of men who were offensive to the South by reason of their anti-slavery character.

The courts of the United States, both supreme and district, throughout the Union, including the clerks and the marshals who summoned the juries and served the processes, were therefore filled with men acceptable to the South.
Cabinets were constituted in the same way.

Representatives of the government in foreign countries were necessarily taken from the class approved by the same power.