Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/544

 Mr. Adams, his secretary of state. General Jackson entertained the same opinion.

To the testimony of these presidents, he added the authority of the senator from Kentucky. During the delay on the part of Spain, in ratifying the treaty of 1819, that senator, then in the other house, taking the same view of the treaty which he (Mr. P.) was now urging — that it was a cession of a part of our territory to which the treaty-making power was incompetent — offered the following resolutions:

"1. Resolved, That the constitution of the United States vests in congress no power to dispose of the territory belonging to them; and that no treaty purporting to alienate any portion thereof is valid, without the concurrence of congress.

"2. Resolved, That the equivalent proposed to be given by Spain to the United States, for that part of Lousiana west of the Sabine, was inadequate, and that it would be inexpedient to make a transfer thereof to any foreign power."

"The author of these resolutions, in advocating them, said: 'He presumed the spectacle would not be presented of questioning, in this branch of the government, our title to Texas, which had been constantly maintained by the executive for more than fifteen years past, under three successive administrations. 'And he said: 'In the Florida treaty, it was not pretended that the object was simply a declaration of where the western line of Louisiana was; it was, on the contrary, the case of an avowed cession of territory from the United States to Spain. The whole of the correspondence manifested that the respective parties to the negotiation were not engaged so much in an inquiry where the limit of Louisiana was, as where it should be. We find various limits discussed. Finally the Sabine is fixed, which neither of the parties ever contended was the ancient limit of Louisiana. And the treaty itself proclaims its purpose to be a cession of the United States to Spain.' Such, Mr. P. said, were the opinions of the senator in 1820, and he trusted the wisdom and patriotism which warred against that rash treaty of 1819, would now be exerted against its great and growing evils, by the reännexation of Texas.

"But he took higher ground than this. Mr. Clay rested the constitutional objection upon the incompetency of the treaty-making power to alienate territory; he (Mr. P.) considered it incompetent to the whole government. The constitution vests in congress the power "to dispose of the territory or other property of the United States." This clause was inserted to give power to effect the objects for which the states had granted these lands to the general government; and the true exposition of the clause was found in our vast and wise laud system. It was never dreamed that congress could dispose of the sovereignty of territory to a foreign power. The south, he said, had gone blindly into this treaty. The importance of Florida had led them precipitately into a measure by which we threw a gem away that would have bought ten Floridas. Under any circumstances, Florida would have been ours in a short time; but our impatience had induced us to purchase it by a territory ten times as large, a hundred times as fertile, and to give five millions of dollars into the bargain. He acquiesced in the past; but he proposed to seize the present fair