split into 3-4 states, it would restore the slave versus free state balance in Congress. President Polk had in 1845 offered the island's owner, Spain, $100 million for the island, but it was refused and Madrid made it clear that they would not part with the island under any circumstance. Southerners were not about to give up their designs on Cuba, and several filibustering expeditions were mounted. They were easily repulsed by the Spanish authorities, and the last attempt ended in fifty Americans being captured and executed for piracy, including many men from the leading families of the South. A group of enraged Southerners responded by ransacking the Spanish consulate in New Orleans. In 1854, the Spanish authorities captured the steamer Black Warrior on a technicality. War appeared to threaten, and Southerners in Congress were aggressively pushing President Pierce for it. Since the European powers were distracted with the Crimean War, there was also nobody that could come to Madrid's assistance. Meanwhile, the US ambassadors to Spain, Britain, and France met in secret in Ostend, Belgium where they proposed a "battle plan" that involved offering Spain up to $120 million for Cuba. If Madrid still refused, then US was justified in taking the island by force. However, the Ostend Manifesto soon leaked out, and an outcry from free soil Northerners forced the Pierce Administration to give up its ambitions on Cuba. Coincidentally, just as Southerners had their eye on territories in the Caribbean, Northerners in the 1850s also developed renewed designs on Canada. In the end, both sides stalemated each other and got nothing as a result. Antislavery and abolitionism The debate over slavery in the pre-Civil War United States has several sides. Abolitionists grew directly out of the Second Great Awakening and the European Enlightenment and saw slavery as an affront to God and/or reason. Abolitionism had roots similar to the temperance movement. The publishing of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1852, galvanized the abolitionist movement. Most debates over slavery, however, had to do with the constitutionality of the extension of slavery rather than its morality. The debates took the form of arguments over the powers of Congress rather than the merits of slavery. The result was the so-called "Free Soil Movement." Free-soilers believed that slavery was dangerous because of what it did to whites. The "peculiar institution" ensured that elites controlled most of the land, property,