Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/176

164 Louisiana did not embrace Texas. If so, Texas belonged by purchase to the United States; if not, it was considered part of the Spanish American territory. Adams, in making his treaty, had only reluctantly given up the line of the Rio Grande del Norte, and accepted that of the Sabine; he might have carried his point, had not Monroe, with the concurrence of the rest of the Cabinet, desired the Sabine as a boundary for peculiar reasons. In a letter to General Jackson he said: “Having long known the repugnance with which the eastern portion of our Union have seen its aggrandizement to the West and South, I have been decidedly of opinion that we ought to be content with Florida for the present.” It was, therefore, in deference to what Monroe understood to be northeastern sentiment that Texas was given up, and it was the abandonment of Texas which Clay put forward as a decisive reason for not renewing the Spanish treaty.

He introduced two resolutions in the House: one asserting that no treaty making a cession of territory was valid without the concurrence of Congress; and the other, substantially, that the cession of Florida to the United States was not an “adequate equivalent” for the “transfer” of Texas by the United States to Spain. In support of these resolutions he made a fiery speech, fiercely castigating the administration for truckling to foreign powers, and extolling the value of Texas, which he stoutly assumed to belong to the United States un-