Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/218

Rh, the leader of the southern ultras there and elsewhere, did the same. So did Waddy Thompson, Botts, Toombs, Lumpkin, Campbell and many other Southerners. W. R. King said that while the South would insist — as a point of pride and right — upon sharing the benefit of any territory gained from Mexico, it was a gross libel to represent her as desiring to increase in that way the strength of slavery.

King deplored the war. One of the South Carolina Senators Wrote that it was detested nowhere more than in his state. In Georgia, too, the conflict was bitterly opposed. The people did not desire the war, said Toombs. Half of the slaveholders oppose it, admitted Ritchie, a Virginian, editor of the administration organ, Besides all other objections, it was pointed out that the southern policy of conservatism and her stand for a strict construction of the Constitution would be endangered by absorbing a large area mainly populated by extremely inferior aliens. To combat all this evidence, we find hardly anything except the characteristic hints, imaginings and assertions of certain abolitionists.

On the other hand, the evidence that the annexation of Texas was essentially the cause of the war is impressive both in quantity and in quality." Benton, Clay, Robert C. Winthrop, Stephen A Douglas, Andrew Johnson and many other public men agreed on this point. As Van Buren and substantially all the Whig organs had predicted that immediate annexation would entail war with Mexico, they must be counted in the same class. Charles Sumner drew up a resolution declaring that such was the primary cause, and it passed the legislature of Massachusetts, where the subject was rather closely studied, by overwhelming majorities. The House committee on foreign affairs took that ground in its report of February 24, 1847. All agree upon this, was Winthrop's declaration. Paredes expressed the same view in the most formal manner. The Mexican minister of war under the government that overthrew Parades publicly endorsed it; and at least two well-qualified foreign observers, Duflott de Mofras and the biographer of Lord Aberdeen, took the same View. Indeed, the proposition seems demonstrated by the plain course of events.

The mere annexation of Texas cannot, however, be regarded