Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 2.djvu/294

276 nigh fatal blunder," even though suggested by the "demon," who was commonly thought rather shrewd. Letting Santa Anna go back to Mexico seemed to different Whigs like treason, treachery, folly and idiocy. Polk "takes his ease on some sixty-eight dollars per day," while the soldiers he has driven to the field subsist on fare that "his very slaves would loathe," the Whig Almanac luckily discovered. Bribery, duplicity, falsehood, imbecility, cowardice and infamy were a few of the other good things found in the President's conduct; and the chief Whig organ undertook to lay him finally at rest on the greensward in this elegant fashion: "Why, the very savage of the courtyard in other times — that most brutal of mankind, the bully of the bailiwick, who chewed up an ear or nose, or scooped out with thumb a prostrate adversary's eye — was generous in comparison."

In attempting more serious criticism the Whigs met with embarrassments. The majority of them, whose argument had been that immediate annexation of Texas would necessarily mean war, could not with inward peace declare that Polk had brought on the war by sending Taylor to the Rio Grande; and the great number whose contention had been that Mexico still owned Texas could not well deny that annexing her province by an Act of Congress, which amounted on their theory to a constitutional declaration of war, had created a state of things which made it entirely proper for Polk to send Taylor there. "Swindlers of 1844, with your 'peaceable annexation,' do not skulk! Here is the fruit of your doings! Look it in the face!" exclaimed the New York Tribune when the war bill passed, but it soon appeared more tactful to ignore this aspect of the matter.

Other embarrassments remained, however. It was very well for northern Whigs to indulge in what Carlyle might have called a "running shriek" against "a pro-slavery war," but they were cautioned to let no echoes of it cross the Potomac. When a Senator greeted the war Message by saying he would later read the documents that accompanied it, and for the present would merely observe that Polk's course was "utterly unjustifiable,' Ritchie paraphrased Master Dogberry at him: "By virtue of mine office I do suspect thee to bea thief." While some papers denounced the government for not settling with Mexico by negotiation, others admitted that