 Fuller addresses American slavery directly in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, recalling her dread at the news that James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder who favored the extension of slavery to Texas, had been elected the nation’s 11th president (by an all-male electorate). The “choice of the people,” she wrote, “threatens to rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy of sin permanently on this nation, with the annexation of Texas!” (F, 97). Addressing “[t]he women of my country,” she asks: “have you nothing to do with this? You see the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness of countless generations of fellow-creatures, the honor of their country, and their immortal souls for a money market and political power. Do you not feel within you that which can reprove them, which can check, which can convince them? You would not speak in vain; whether each in her own home, or banded in union” (F, 98).