The number of votes cast had increased, it would seem, over sixteen hundred. Little is remembered of an exciting or important nature during this national administration, so far as this neighborhood is concerned, save the hardly-suppressed indignation (first) at the quite unnecessary strain which the abettors of the Fugitive Slave Law were putting upon the feeling of loyalty and obedience among the people and (second) at the intervention for conscience or for effect, of the small body of Abolitionists, who really had no following in tliis county.

But the Presidential election of 1856 developed the fact of great impatience, and of great unwillingness to be made uncomfortable, by extremists. Although the free soil vote, less than one-fourth in 1848, was, in 1856, more than one-third, it meant not for a moment interference with slavery in the Southern States. The sentiment of abhorrence for the institution never took form beyond its non-extension, and the rights of the States were as fully cherished, as devotion to the Union was afterward the absorbing principle. State sovereignty had free and open statement, and the charge of intermeddling, whenever alleged, was laughed down as an absurd insinuation.

The course of Mr. Buchanan in his Lecompton policy, which was believed to be in direct contradiction to the principle of popular sovereignty, upon which he was elected, brought out the indignant opposition of a portion of his northern and western supporters, and their representatives in Congress, prominent among whom was Mr. John B. Haskin,the member from the Ninth District of New York, in which was Westchester County. In the Congressional election of 1858, in this District, the course of the administration was made the issue, and Mr. Gouverneur Kemble, having been nominated by the Democratic party, Mr. Haskin was placed by his friends in the political field.