ostend Manifesto
- Efforts to extend the nation's domain could not avoid becoming entangled with the sectional crisis
- Pierce had been pursuing unsuccessful diplomatic attempts to buy Cuba from Spain
- In 1854, a group of his envoys sen him a private document from Ostend, Belgium making the case for sizing Cuba by force
- Ostend Manifesto enraged many antislavery northerners who charged the administration with conspiring to bring a new slave state into the Union
- South opposed all efforts to acquire new territory that would not support a slave system
- a Powerful union to annex Canada to the United States came