This is the first time that has ever been done. As a boy in upstate New York, the new president’s family was financially middling but owned six slaves. Thus, Van Buren is not opposed to the practice. His speech makes this clear: “I must go into the presidential chair being a flexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the wishes of the slaveholding states, and also with the determination to resist the slightest interference with [slavery] in the states where it exists.” This is obvious pandering to the
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