Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/97

Rh was Clay's own. It was that Western ambition which wanted the Republic to spread and to occupy a “big country.” Now Clay was at the head of the Committee on Foreign Relations in the Senate, and the subject presented itself to him in an entirely new aspect.

Texas had in the mean time had a history. In the early part of this century American adventurers cast their eyes upon that country, and in 1819 one James Long attempted to make Texas an “independent republic.” In 1821 an American citizen, Moses Austin, having obtained a large grant of land in Texas from the Mexican government, founded an American colony there, which, in its growth, recruited itself mainly from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The settlers brought their slaves with them, and continued to do so notwithstanding a decree of the Mexican Congress, issued in July, 1824, which forbade the importation into Mexican territory of slaves from foreign countries, and notwithstanding the Constitution adopted the same year, which declared free all children thereafter born of slaves.

About that time the slave-holders in the United States began to see in Texas an object of peculiar interest to them. The Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri as a Slave State and opening to slavery all that part of the Louisiana purchase south of 36° 30′, seemed at first to give a great advantage to the slave power. But gradually it became apparent that the territory thus opened to slavery