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 FEDERAL RELATIONS OF OREGON

271

Polk, only a day or so before the Secretary of State had addressed a communication to. the people of Oregon, as the Senator knew, giving them assurances that they would be pro-

by the United States and expressing the opinion that a territorial bill would be enacted at the next session of ConColonel Benton took the President's remarks under gress. consideration that the letter would do less harm if published but the letter went on to Oregon. in an eastern paper tected

According to Benton, Calhoun's object was to secure the presidency at the next

in all his agitation

election, a view in which Polk concurred, although he did not say so to Benton. Furthermore, "in the course of the conversation Gen'l Benton

dropped the idea distinctly that the New York gentlemen (Dickinson and Dix and the delegation in the House) had gone home from Congress with a full record of all the facts & intended to make an issue on that question * * * The is there is no patriotism in either faction of the party. Both desire to mount slavery as a hobby, and hope to secure the election of their favorite with it. They will fail and ought

truth

to fail."

The

President,

even to his

own

however, did not confide to Benton nor diary that he himself was in general accord

with the general idea which actuated Calhoun:

i.

e.,

the erec-

tion out of the territory to be gained from Mexico of units in which there would be no restriction on slavery. Polk was not

guided by the desire to be president a second term, for if there is in his course any consistency to be ranked with that with which he worked to obtain California and' New Mexico, it is his unfailing discouragement of all suggestions that he should try for a second election. If it was not to curry political favor with the South that Polk pursued his course, neither was it

merely to provide for the extension of territory where slaves might be held legally he desired an expansion of the territory of the United States, but more, he did not wish his country

disrupted on the issue of slavery, and so he strove to maintain the balance between the two sections. This is testified to by