The Washington Sentinel, edited by Beverley Tucker, launches a fierce defense of Democratic presidential candidate James Buchanan against attacks from the Louisville Journal. The core dispute centers on whether Buchanan supports "squatter sovereignty"—the controversial doctrine allowing settlers in western territories to decide slavery's status themselves—or the Southern conservative position that Congress should control such matters. Tucker meticulously deconstructs the Cincinnati Platform's language on territorial governance, arguing the platform explicitly repudiates squatter sovereignty and that Buchanan's own writings prove his alignment with Southern interests. He ridicules the Louisville Journal's suggestion that Southern Democrats should instead support ex-President Millard Fillmore, calling it absurd given Fillmore's record supporting anti-slavery politicians and his role in annulling the Missouri Compromise in 1850.

This 1856 editorial captures the Democratic Party's desperate internal struggle just months before the election—and on the eve of the Civil War. The slavery question had become so radioactive that even Democrats couldn't agree on what their own platform meant. Buchanan's evasiveness on "squatter sovereignty" reflected a national crisis: territorial expansion westward forced Americans to decide whether new states could permit slavery, and no answer satisfied both North and South. Tucker's defense of Buchanan would prove tragically inadequate; Buchanan's presidency (1857-1861) would be remembered as catastrophically ineffectual in preventing secession, partly because his ambiguous positions satisfied no one.

• Tucker specifically quotes Buchanan's Sandford letter defining 'people of a Territory' as those 'assembled in convention to form a State constitution'—not the 'first adventurers or first comers' arriving in the territory. This was a technicality that tried to square an impossible circle.
• The Sentinel reveals that in New York City, the Republican minority of 6,000 votes somehow controlled five major newspapers with aggregate circulation exceeding one million, while Democratic papers like the News and Day Book 'eke out a starvling life.' Tucker identifies this media imbalance as a structural Democratic weakness.
• Tucker threatens the Louisville Journal with comparisons to Charles Sumner and Joshua Giddings—anti-slavery Republicans—suggesting that any questioning of Buchanan's soundness borders on abolitionist thinking, revealing how thoroughly the slavery question had poisoned political rhetoric.
• The editorial invokes Shakespeare's madman line about leaving 'this fair mountain' to feed 'on that moor,' using Elizabethan poetry to argue that abandoning Buchanan for Fillmore would be trading the frying pan for fire.
• Tucker claims the Democratic party's weakness stems from failing to establish a truly powerful organ—imagining a Democratic paper with 'a million subscribers' issued morning and evening with experts in 'every branch of knowledge.' No such paper would emerge during his lifetime.

• Beverley Tucker was himself a Virginia slaveholder and ideologue; his passionate defense of Buchanan reflected deep personal stakes. Within five years, his beloved Democratic party would fracture, and Tucker would serve the Confederacy as a diplomat—showing how prescient his 1856 anxieties about party unity actually were.
• The Cincinnati Platform that Tucker quotes so extensively was the 1856 Democratic convention platform. Its vague language on territories would become the foundation of the Dred Scott decision just months later, when the Supreme Court would declare that Congress had no power to restrict slavery in territories—vindicating Southern interpretation but infuriating the North.
• Millard Fillmore, the man Tucker ridicules as Buchanan's alternative, was indeed running in 1856—as the Know Nothing (anti-immigration) party's candidate. Tucker's contempt for him reflected both slavery politics and anxiety about nativist rivals splitting the conservative vote.
• Tucker's attack on newspaper economics anticipated a real crisis: during the Civil War that erupted just five years later, the ability to control information through major papers would become a weapon. His 1856 complaint about Republican papers drowning out Democratic ones would prove prophetic.
• The article's obsessive focus on proving Buchanan's Southern credentials backfired spectacularly: Buchanan would be elected in November 1856, but his indecisiveness on Kansas slavery violence and his eventual opposition to Southern secession would make him despised by both regions—vindicating the Louisville Journal's skepticism that Tucker so arrogantly dismissed.