The Washington Telegraph's September 10, 1856 front page is dominated by a scorching 30-point indictment of Democratic presidential nominee James Buchanan, reprinted from the Macon Republican. The attack is relentless and personal: Buchanan is accused of flip-flopping on slavery (calling it 'a great moral evil' in 1826, then embracing 'Squatter Sovereignty' by 1856), denouncing foreigners while now welcoming them, and conspiring to exclude Southern slaveholders from western territories. Point 25 notes that at the Cincinnati Convention, Buchanan secured only 34 of 120 Southern votes on the first ballot—a 'freesoil triumph' forced upon the South by Northern pressure. The second major story reports on the Last Island disaster, a catastrophic August 1856 hurricane that devastated Louisiana's Last Island resort. Correspondent 'Creole' describes bodies drifting across the Gulf, many never to be identified, and worse: 'a gang of wreckers' plundering corpses for jewelry and valuables, leaving 'the trace of the fatal knife about the pockets of the victims.' A steamboat loaded with determined gentlemen from Franklin has arrived to pursue the perpetrators. Finally, the Treasury Department provides a comprehensive census of U.S. population and property values by state, showing New York leading with 3.47 million people and $1.36 billion in property value, while Arkansas—home to this newspaper—had just 253,117 people and $64.2 million in assessed property.

This edition captures America at a critical 1856 crossroads. The presidential race between Buchanan (Democrat) and John C. Frémont (Republican, anti-slavery) was the era's most polarizing election, fought entirely over slavery's expansion into western territories. The Buchanan attack piece reveals Southern anxieties that their candidate had been compromised—that 'Squatter Sovereignty' would actually empower Northern settlers and free-staters to exclude slavery from Kansas and Nebraska. Simultaneously, the Last Island hurricane and the looting of corpses illustrate the pre-Civil War South's social chaos and lawlessness in remote areas. The property valuations show the massive wealth disparity: New York's property was worth 21 times Arkansas's, reflecting the industrial North's growing economic dominance over the agricultural South—a gap that would help determine the war's outcome just five years later.

• Point 14 resurrects a 23-year-old scandal: In 1824-25, Buchanan allegedly spread the 'Corrupt Bargain' rumor against Henry Clay—that Clay traded his political support to John Quincy Adams in exchange for the Secretary of State position—'poisoning the mind of Gen. Jackson against him for many long years.' This fabricated story actually shaped American politics for a generation.
• Point 19 reveals Buchanan's involvement in the Ostend Manifesto (1854), where he and other U.S. diplomats advised obtaining Cuba 'honestly if we could, but if we could not, he advised us to steal it'—framed here as pro-sugar trade rather than pro-slavery, showing how slavery politics infected every major foreign policy debate.
• The Last Island disaster account mentions bodies drifting 'some thirty miles into the ocean' and washing up days later along the coast between 'Oyster Bayou and the Grand Caillou'—a geographic sweep suggesting a storm surge of catastrophic proportions, yet this hurricane barely registers in most histories.
• Point 27 notes Buchanan favored 'unnaturalized foreigners voting in Kansas and Nebraska'—meaning non-citizens who'd been in America less than three weeks could vote to decide slavery's fate, while Southern slaveholders were effectively barred from emigrating there. This is presented as pro-immigration policy masking anti-Southern colonization strategy.
• The Treasury table shows Wisconsin Territory with only $37.5 million in property value despite 552,109 people—suggesting either extreme undervaluation or that frontier wealth was heavily concentrated in land rather than assessed taxable property.

• James Buchanan's 1815 anti-foreigner stance (Point 18) made him a proto-Know Nothing, yet by 1856 he was championing open immigration—a 41-year inversion that foreshadowed the Republican Party's eventual embrace of restrictionist politics a century later.
• Point 7 quotes Buchanan declaring slavery 'A CURSE TO THE NATION' on April 11, 1826—exactly 34 years before the 1860 election that would shatter the nation. His early antislavery rhetoric made his 1856 pivot to Squatter Sovereignty feel like ultimate betrayal to both camps.
• The Last Island disaster correspondent warns that most victims 'come in under such a state of decomposition, that there remains no mark by which they can be singled out'—a grim reminder that in the pre-modern era, a single hurricane could erase entire families from the historical record simply through bodily unidentifiability.
• The property valuation table reveals that the entire Kansas Territory (site of violent pro/anti-slavery conflict) was assessed at just $2.35 million—less than a single wealthy Maryland county—making the territorial slavery fight literally about controlling territory with minimal existing economic value, purely for its future political power.
• Buchanan's attack on Pennsylvania's tariff voting (Points 15-16) shows that slavery wasn't the *only* explosive issue—economic protectionism divided North from South too, and a politician could flip on both issues simultaneously, reflecting how fragmented American politics had become by 1856.