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tend that it was impossible for a treaty to have been made, for we had refused to treat. against us, the presumption is warranted that peace could have been preserved by honorable negotiation. And now, by the act which we are about to examine, we in like manner deprived ourselves of any right to assert, that even after negotiations were broken off, war might have been commenced by Mexico.

On the 13th of January, 1846, General Taylor was ordered to "advance from Corpus Christi as early as the season would permit, and occupy a position on or near the Rio Grande." We shall devote a considerable space to the examination of this act of our government, because it was the most important event in the history of the war, and no one can be competent to form any opinion concerning the causes of that unhappy contest, without fully understanding it.

Burke, in his reflections on the French revolution, says: "We have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects but with due caution; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and tremb

ling solicitude." This caution we have endeavored to exercise, and such awe and solicitude we trust our patriotism inspires; but we are unable to resist the conviction that this advance was an intentional and deliberate act of war on the part of our government.

By a law passed immediately after her independence, Texas declared her western boundary to be the Rio Grande, from its mouth to its source. Mexico, on the contrary, claimed that portions of New-Mexico, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas, departments of her own territory, lay east of this pretended boundary, and formed no part of the state of Texas.

Our government on several occasions recognized this claim of Mexico as entitled to its respect. Our secretary of state in 1844, in stating to Mexico the policy of this country, says, that "the president desires to settle the question of boundary on the most liberal and satisfactory terms." When, nearly a year after, congress consented to the annexation, they did so on the express condition that the territory should be "subject to the adjustment by this government of all questions of boundary that may arise with other governments."

But after all this, and while the question stood in precisely the same situation, our executive assumes the claim of Mexico to be unfounded, sends its army to the utmost limit of its pretensions, where it blockades the harbor of Point Isabel, and the mouth of the Rio Grande, and plants its cannon, "within good range for demolishing" the peaceful town of Matamoros; and writes to General Taylor that the attempt by Mexico to cross the Rio Grande with a considerable force would be regarded as an invasion of the United States and the commencement of hostilities.

On the mere statement of these facts the United States must stand convicted of the unjust act of treating with violent disregard a claim, which they had acknowledged it their duty to respect, and which was made by a nation with whom they were at peace, and whom it was, under the circumstances, peculiarly their duty to conciliate.

CHAPTER VI.

THE advance to the Rio Grande an invasion of the territory of Mexico. Louisiana as ceded to us by France in 1803 extended no farther west than to the Nueces. This river the western boundary of the Spanish province of Texas prior to 1820. The same river the boundary of the Mexican State of Texas. Texas after her independence never in any legal manner enlarged her territory. The strip of country in question in the exclusive possession of Mexico in 1846. Government aware at the time the order for the advance was issued that it would be an invasion.

THE advance of our army was not only a disregard of an unadjusted claim which it was our duty to respect, it was an invasion of the territory of Mexico. The claim of Mexico to the left bank of the Rio Grande was well founded, and there existed not a shadow of title on which Texas could rest her pretension to it. It formed no part of the state of Texas, but was and always had been in the peaceable possession of Mexico, and under the jurisdiction of her laws.

It has been contended that the boundary

which separated ancient Louisiana from NewMexico and New Spain, formed the true western limit of Texas. The latter provinces were the original possessions of Spain. Louisiana was a province of France. In 1803 France ceded the province of Louisiana to the United States. It became important afterward to settle the boundary between the territory thus ceded and the Spanish possessions. By the treaty of 1819, the Sabine river was determined to be that boundary. The United States had derived from France an undefined claim to territory west of that river, but it was surrendered to Spain as a part of the consideration for the cession of Florida.

It was now contended that by this treaty of 1819 the United States had surrendered to Spain the entire territory from the Sabine to the Rio Grande, to all which she had received an unquestionable title from France, and that Texas embraced the identical and entire country thus surrendered; and consequently that, Texas being annexed, Mexico had no shadow of reason for disputing our authority quite to the Rio Grande.

Now we could derive from France no title

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