Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/297

Rh was commended to Congress carried it through by a small majority among the politicians, but the people were too wild with anxiety to know much of Juarez, their great defender, until years had proved his worth and given him a place among the world's great reformers. The churchmen, having failed in the defence of their property, now appealed to the passions of the mob. There were riots in the capital and elsewhere. Yucatan seceded and Indian raids harassed the northern States, while foreign guns thundering against Mexican ports along both the Gulf and the Pacific shores added their terrors to the scene. Some great public calamity was needed in this crisis by which these warring States and people should be united by a sense of common danger to defend their country against a common enemy.

Amid all this fierce internal strife, Mexico was drawn into a war with her powerful neighbor the United States. Until boundary questions were settled between the two countries, in 1819, the Rio Grande had been claimed as the southern border of Louisiana. To rejoin this vast territory, justly yielded then to Spain, and to devote it to the extension of slavery, had become the aim of a large party in the United States. There was room in the cotton- and the sugar-producing lands of Texas and the country west of it for a tier of States larger than all New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.

When Mexico became a republic, slavery was prohibited in its first constitution, although in Texas this law had been a dead letter. There was now a growing public sentiment against all class-distinctions which led to the reenactment, in 1825, of an old viceregal law against the sale and importation of slaves. Two years later the