56. “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” – U.S. should be prepared to go to war with Britain (again) if they were unwilling to move their border north to the 54, 40 degree boundary (near Russian-owned Alaska at this point)
57. Polk decides to be diplomatic and settles on the 49th parallel (where Washington and Vancouver, B.C. still separate the two countries today)
58.
59.
60. Send an agent to buy California, New Mexico, most of Arizona, and the Rio Grande border of Texas for $25 million
172. Republicans began to charge Southern Democrats of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery through measures such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act
173. Lincoln takes on Douglas, President James Buchanan, and Chief Justice Roger Taney as proponents of this conspiracy in his famous, “House Divided” speech