Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 20.pdf/209

 THE FEDERAL RELATIONS cabinet,

we should have been

Intelligencer

OF OREGON

199

better pleased to see the National

coming out with the expression of

its

own

We

should have been better opinions on the question itself. satisfied to have seen the National Intelligencer vindicating the just claims of our country against the assaults and arguments of British tongues and British pens and we still hope to see that journal thus employed and not again, as in the case of Texas, counteracting the rights and interests of our own

country."

To

this exposition the Intelligencer called the attention of readers and bade them mark the course of the government which had had its course thus outlined in a reputed organ: "We who watch the power, can now oblige it to speak out, and, when it has spoken, can force it to stand to what it has said." The editors considered that the Administration had in so its

many words bound itself to negotiate on the "question which has spread so much alarm through the moneyed and commerthe Oregon question." 8 cial interests of the country Most western papers and many of the northern papers of Democratic tendencies looked upon Folk's pronouncements as unequivocal in

its

support of the claim to 54

40'.

The Whig

papers and some of the southern Democratic papers, as noted above, reflected the views shown in the citations above. Here and there, however, was sounded a note, bitter in the West

and hopeful in the East, which indicated a shade of doubt. The St. Louis Republican, for instance, after printing a letter in which Peter Burnett discussed the possibility of an inde9

pendent Oregon, said: "In reality there is no reasonable prospect of a settlement of the question by negotiation, for years to come; and there is an influence in the administration of Mr. Polk, which will prevent Neither Mr. Calhoun nor any a resort to any other means. of his friends, in South Carolina, nor any of the mettlesome statesmen of that school, who were so hot in the pursuit of Texas, will tolerate or permit a resort to arms in defense of our rightful claim to Oregon. They will have no war with Great Britain, come what else may; and Mr. Polk is not the man to defy them in such a contingency. What is now only 8

The

articles

were in the Intelligencer,

5

and

7

May;

quoted in Niles' Register of 10 May. 9 Of 9 August, 1845, quoted in Register, ^3 August.

the Union articles a*e