Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/238

 232 Southern Historical Society Papers.

has ever ventured to question. It is, therefore, an incontestable fact that there was not a particle of truth in those allegations of the Sec- retary, and that he was fully conscious of it. To pervert the truth in such a manner required indeed a bold front."

Can the utmost charity suppose that Dr. von Hoist, who has un- dertaken to write a constitutional history of the United States, does not know the difference between the United States, on the one hand, and Calhoun, Preston, Thompson, Tyler, Upshur, the Legislatures of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, and the whole South on the other ? They were not " the United States,' ' neither individually nor collectively. Calhoun was not speaking of or for them, nor of what they had done or proposed. Every schoolboy knows that "the United States " for years declined to meet Texas' wish for annexa- tion, though backed by all these potent influences, and the very facts stated by von Hoist, to prove that Calhoun "lied, "proved that he stated the case with the utmost exactness of truth.

Calhoun rested his defence of his government for proposing then to annex Texas, after having so long declined, on "the state of things." The very paragraph selected for quotation by von Hoist shows that. What was that "state of things"?

The pro.ximity of Texas to the mouths of the Mississippi river rendered its possession by so weak a power as Mexico a constant menace to the trade of the whole Mississippi valley. Mexico was too weak to prevent a strong power like Great Britain seizing Texas as 2. poiyit (T appui, from which to attack New Orleans and annihilate the commerce of that great emporium of the Southern and Western States, in case of another war. For this reason the acquisition of Texas had long been deemed desirable by many American statesmen, including at one time even J. Q. Adams himself. In 1843 another war with Great Britain had become not improbable, in view of the Oregon and other complications. Therefore, to our citizens in distant Oregon, as well as to those in the Mississippi valley, the annexation of Texas had become desirable, because of its relation to New Orleans and the commerce of the Mississippi, important elements of national power for the solution of the Oregon and other questions. It may well be doubted whether the Oregon dispute could have been so easily settled if Captain Elliott, "the man in the white hat," had been successful in the objects of his mission to Texas ; that is to say, in securing Texas as a commercial dependency of Great Britain, in abolishing slavery in Texas, and in building up on our Southwestern border another Canada. (See speech of Senator Houston, Congres-