At the first session of the Twenty-ninth Congress (1845-46), Mr. Webster took his seat as the successor of Mr. Choate in the Senate of the United States. The question of the admission of Texas was decided at the very commencement of the session. It was opposed by Mr. Webster. To all the other objections to the measure in his mind was added that of unconstitutionality. The annexation was now brought about simply by a joint resolution of the two houses, after it had been found impossible to effect it by treaty, the only form known to the Constitution by which a compact can be entered into with a foreign power. Mr. Jefferson was of opinion in 1803, that even a treaty with France was not sufficient for the annexation of Louisiana, but that an amendment of the Constitution was necessary for that purpose. In 1845 the executive and a majority of Congress, having failed to carry the ratification of a treaty of annexation by the constitutional majority, scrupled not to accomplish their purpose by a joint resolution of the two houses; and this measure was effected under the lead of statesmen who claim to construe the Constitution with literal strictness. Events like these furnish a painful illustration of the frailty of constitutional restraints as a barrier against the consummation of the favorite measures of a dominant party.
The great event of the administration of President Polk was the war with Mexico. The time has not yet arrived when the counsels under which this war was brought about can be fully unfolded. On the 2d of December, 1845, in his first annual message, having communicated to Congress the acceptance by Texas of the terms of annexation offered by the joint resolution, President Polk thus expressed himself:—
“This accession to our territory has been a bloodless achievement. No arm of force has been raised to produce the result. The sword has had no part in the victory. We have not sought to extend our territorial possessions by conquest, or our republican institutions over a reluctant people. It was the deliberate homage of each people to the great principle of our federative Union.”
The proffered annexation of Texas had been declined both cxlvi by General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren, on the ground that, unless made with the consent of Mexico, it would involve a war with that power. That this would be the effect was not less certain on the 2d of December, 1845, when Congress were congratulated on the “bloodless” acquisition, than it was when, on the 13th of January following, General Taylor was instructed to occupy the left bank of the Rio del Norte. In fact, in the very message in which President Polk remarks to Congress “that the sword had had no part in the victory,” he gives them also the significant information, that, upon the earnest appeal both of the Congress and convention of Texas, he had ordered “an efficient military force to take a position between the Nueces and the Del Norte.”
This force, however efficient in proportion to its numbers and in virtue of the gallantry and skill of its commander, was found to be inadequate to sustain the brunt of the Mexican arms. Rapid movements on the part of Generals Ampudia and Arista, commanding on the frontier, seriously endangered the safety of General Taylor’s force, and it became necessary for Congress to strengthen it by prompt reinforcements. In this way the war was commenced. No formal declaration had taken place, nor had it been in the power of Congress to make known its will on the subject, till an absolute necessity arose of reinforcing General Taylor, and the subject had ceased to be one for legislative discretion.
Under these circumstances it was of course impossible for Mr. Webster to approve the war. It had been brought on by the executive will, and without the concurrence of Congress till Congress had ceased to have an option, and its well-known ulterior objects were such as he could not but contemplate with equal disapprobation and alarm. Still, however, in common with the body of his political friends, in and out of Congress, he abstained from all factious opposition, and all measures calculated to embarrass the government. The supplies were voted for by him, but he never ceased to urge upon the President to pursue a magnanimous policy toward the distracted and misgoverned country with which we had been brought in collision. Nor did his opinions of the character of the war lead him to discourage the inclination of his younger son, Mr. Edward Webster, to accept a commission in the regiment of Massachusetts cxlvii Volunteers. This young gentleman had evinced an energy beyond his years, and practical talent of a high order, as a member of the commission for marking the boundary line between Maine and the British Provinces under the treaty of Washington. His friends looked forward with confidence to his running a brilliant military career. These hopes, like those which accompanied so many other gallant and patriotic spirits to the scene of action, were destined to be early blasted. Major Webster fell a victim to the labors and exposures of the service, and to the climate of the country, under the walls of Mexico.
To avoid all misconception, it may be proper to state that Mr. Webster has at all times entertained an unfavorable opinion of the various administrations by which Mexico, almost ever since her revolution, has been successively misgoverned. He has felt constrained to regard the greater part of them as military factions, bent more upon supplanting each other than upon promoting the welfare of their country. He was fully aware of the justice of many of the complaints of citizens of the United States for wrongs inflicted and justice withheld. Both while in the executive government himself, and as a member of Congress, he had uniformly expressed himself in terms of severe condemnation of the conduct of the Mexican government in withholding or delaying redress; and he foresaw and foretold that, in obstinately refusing to recognize the independence of Texas, she was laying up for herself a store of consequences the most humiliating and disastrous. Nothing but the most deplorable infatuation could have led the government of Mexico to suppose, that, after the independence of Texas had been recognized by the United States, Great Britain, France, and Belgium, it would be possible for a power as feeble as that of Mexico to reduce the rebellious province to submission. If any confirmation of these statements is needed, it may be found in Mr. Webster’s letter to Mr. de Bocanegra, in the sixth volume of this collection.
The settlement of the controversy with England relative to the boundary of Oregon was effected in the first year of Mr. Polk’s administration. The foundations for this adjustment had long been laid; in fact, as long ago as the administration of Mr. Monroe, the United States had offered to England the obvious basis of the extension of the forty-ninth degree of latitude cxlviii to the Pacific. Great Britain allowed herself to be influenced by the Hudson’s Bay Company so far, as to insist upon following the course of the Columbia down to the sea. She even took the extravagant ground that, although the United States, by the Louisiana and Florida treaties, combined the Spanish and the French titles with that of actual contiguity and prior discovery of the Columbia River, they had no exclusive title to any portion of the territory, but that it was all subject to her own joint and rival claim. This unreasonable pretension brought the two countries to the verge of war. The Baltimore Convention, in the year 1844, set up a claim, equally unreasonable, to the whole of the territory. President Polk in his inaugural message, quoting the words of the resolution of the Baltimore Convention, pronounced our title to the territory to be “clear and unquestionable.”
The assertion of these opposite extremes of pretension happily resulted in the final adjustment on the forty-ninth degree. Mr. Webster had uniformly been of opinion that this was the fair basis of settlement. Had he supposed that an arrangement could have been effected on this basis with Lord Ashburton, he would gladly have included it in the treaty of Washington. After Mr. Webster’s retirement from the Department of State, it is stated by President Polk that Mr. Upshur instructed Mr. Everett to offer that line to the British government; but the negotiation had in the mean time, by the appointment of Mr. Pakenham, been transferred to Washington. The offer of the forty-ninth degree of latitude was renewed to Mr. Pakenham, but accompanied with conditions which led him to decline it, and to express the hope that the United States would make “some further proposal for the settlement of the Oregon question more consistent with fairness and equity, and with the reasonable expectations of the British government.” The offer thus injudiciously rejected was withdrawn by the administration. In this dangerous juncture of affairs, the following incidents occurred, which we give in the words of the “London Examiner”:
“In reply to a question put to him in reference to the present war establishments of this country, and the propriety of applying the principle of arbitration in the settlement of disputes arising among nations, Mr. McGregor, one of the candidates for the representation of Glasgow, cxlix took occasion to narrate the following very important and remarkable anecdote in connection with our recent, but now happily terminated differences with the United States on the Oregon question. At the time our ambassador at Washington, the Hon. Mr. Pakenham, refused to negotiate on the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude as the basis of a treaty, and when by that refusal the danger of a rupture between Great Britain and America became really imminent, Mr. Daniel Webster, formerly Secretary of State to the American government, wrote a letter to Mr. McGregor, in which he strongly deprecated Mr. Pakenham’s conduct, which, if persisted in and adopted at home, would, to a certainty, embroil the two countries, and suggested an equitable compromise, taking the forty-ninth parallel as the basis of an adjustment. Mr. McGregor agreeing entirely with Mr. Webster in the propriety of a mutual giving and taking to avoid a rupture, and the more especially as the whole territory in dispute was not worth £20,000 to either power, while the preparations alone for a war would cost a great deal more before the parties could come into actual conflict, communicated the contents of Mr. Webster’s letter to Lord John Russell, who at the time was living in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, and, in reply, received a letter from Lord John, in which he stated his entire accordance with the proposal recommended by Mr. Webster, and approved of by Mr. McGregor, and requested the latter, as he (Lord John) was not in a position to do it himself, to intimate his opinion to Lord Aberdeen. Mr. McGregor, through Lord Canning, Under-Secretary for the Foreign Department, did so, and the result was, that the first packet that left England carried out to America the proposal, in accordance with the communication already referred to, on which the treaty of Oregon was happily concluded. Mr. McGregor may, therefore, be very justly said to have been the instrument of preserving the peace of the world; and for that alone, even if he had no other services to appeal to, he has justly earned the applause and admiration, not of his own countrymen only, but of all men who desire to promote the best interests of the human race.”