Henry Clay of Kentucky was placed in nomination by the Whigs, who now opposed the annexation of Texas, and asked that a restriction be placed on the veto power of the president. James K. Polk of Tennessee was nominated by the Democrats, who declared for the annexation of Texas and upheld the veto power.

James G. Birney of New York was again nominated by the Liberty party, which opposed slavery. This party in 1840 had received but seven thousand votes; in this election it received sixty thousand votes. It was strong in New York, Birney's own state, where it is said to have so recruited votes from the Whig party that the electoral vote of New York went to the Democrats,—to which cause more than any other, Clay's defeat was attributed.

Polk was elected with George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania as vice-president.

POLK'S ADMINISTRATION

DEMOCRATIC: 1845-1849

429. James K. Polk, the eleventh president of the United States, was the son of a farmer, and a graduate of the University of North Carolina. He removed with his father to Tennessee, where he was admitted to the bar in 1820. He was elected as a congressman from Tennessee five years later, and served as chairman of the ways and means committee in the house of representatives. For five sessions, from 1835 to 1839, he was speaker of the house, which position brought him prominently before the public. In 1839 he was elected governor of Tennessee, but failed of reëlection two years later. In 1844 he was nominated by the Democratic National Convention at Baltimore as a "safe" man, and because he favored the annexation of Texas.

On assuming the presidency, he surrounded himself with an especially able cabinet, among whom were James Buchanan, afterwards president of the United States, Robert J. Walker, an able financier, and George Bancroft, the historian.

It was during his administration that political parties

began to divide more and more upon the question of the extension of slavery. The very question of territorial expansion had become so identified with the slavery question as now to become a national issue of the greatest importance and to involve the permanency of the union of the states. Polk, however, reared in the political school of Andrew Jackson, apparently had no fears of disunion. Like Jackson, he at all times advocated national unity.

He declined a renomination to the presidency, and at the end of his term of office retired to private life at Nashville, Tennessee, where he died a few months later, in 1849. was born in 1795.

He

430. Dispute over the Boundary of Texas.-When Texas in 1886 had declared her independence of Mexico she had claimed as her southwestern boundary the Rio Grande River,

although the land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande had been settled early in the seventeenth century by Spaniards and had been in undisputed possession of the Spaniards and Mexicans ever since. Mexico claimed that the Nueces River was the south western boundary of Texas. When the news reached Mexico that Texas had been annexed, the Mexicans clamored for war and Texas sent an urgent request to President Polk to dispatch an army of United States troops to the frontier to protect the citizens of Texas against the threatened attack of Mexico. President Polk at once dispatched General Zachary Taylor with an army to the Mexican frontier to await developments.

431. Taylor's Army of Occupation.-General Taylor took a position at Corpus Christi on the west bank of the Nueces River, the actual Mexican frontier, and for several months there was nothing to indicate intended hostilities beyond the protection of Texas as one of the states of the republic. In November, 1845, President Polk sent John Slidell as envoy extraordinary to Mexico to negotiate with that government a settlement of the boundary question. Upon Mexico's refusal to recognize Slidell, Polk ordered Taylor to advance, and on the 8th of March, 1846, Taylor with a large army marched into the disputed territory. Selecting Point Isabel on the Gulf as a base of operations, he rapidly moved forward to the Rio Grande River and built Fort Brown, across from Matamoras, where a strong force of Mexicans had gathered under General Arista. On April 26, 1846, a small detachment of American dragoons under Major Seth B. Thornton was attacked by a force of Mexican lancers near Fort Brown, where the first blood of the war was shed. After a desperate fight Thornton was captured, whereupon more Mexicans soon crossed and began threatening Fort Brown. Taylor, fearing that the American army might be cut off from its base of supplies at Point Isabel, left the fort in charge of a garrison of three hundred men and immediately returned to the Point.

General Arista, believing that the American army had left for the coast in a precipitate retreat, at once moved an army of six thousand men across the river and took a strong position at Palo Alto, with the view of attacking Fort Brown. Taylor, having secured his supplies, began his return march to Fort Brown, and on the morning of the 8th of May unexpectedly came upon the Mexican troops at Palo Alto and at once gave battle. The Mexicans were driven from the field closely pursued by Taylor. On the following day he overtook them at Resaca de la Palma, where he so completely routed them that they did not cease in their headlong flight until they had placed the Rio Grande between themselves and their pursuers.

· 432. Declaration of War-May 11, 1846.-When news of Major Thornton's capture reached Washington, President Polk at once sent a message to congress notifying that body that "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, invaded her territory, and shed American blood upon American soil.". His message recommended an immediate declaration of war since, he said, "war exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself.” Congress promptly responded to the president's request, and on the 11th of May, 1846, declared war against Mexico, passed a bill making an appropriation of ten million dollars, and voted to raise an army of fifty thousand volunteers.

The war spirit ran high in the United States, particularly in the south. To the call for troops fully three hundred thousand volunteers responded, from which body of men such splendid armies were selected that the Americans did. not lose a single battle during the entire period of the

war.

433. Opposition to the War. However, there were many citizens of the United States who opposed the issue of war with Mexico on high moral grounds. They urged that the republic would place herself in an unfavorable light

before the eyes of the civilized world should she wage a war against a sister republic for the purpose of despoiling her of her territorial possessions; and further, that the war was in the interest of the extension of slavery, and as such it would tend to provoke discord among the states of the American union. James Russell Lowell wrote part of the first series of the "Biglow Papers" against it, and James Fenimore Cooper, his novel entitled "Jack Tier, or, The Florida Reef."

The abolition element in the north was particularly strong in its opposition to the war. The moral sentiment of the country condemned every movement which tended to the further extension of slavery, and in other particulars condemned the war as unjustifiable. It was outspoken in opposition to a war, the disguised purpose of which was the "spoils of territory."

The war was also opposed on political grounds, by the Whig party, which placed itself in opposition to a declaration of war, when the president sent his message to congress recommending war on the ground that American blood had been shed on American soil. Abraham Lincoln, then a Whig member from Illinois, introduced a resolution in the house known as the "spot resolution." In this he asked that the president be requested to give information to congress designating geographically the particular "spot" where hostilities had begun and to prove that "the spot" was part of the territory of the United States-intimating thereby that the president had needlessly and uselessly precipitated the struggle at the suggestion of the slaveholding states, in order that an excuse might be furnished to despoil Mexico of the provinces of New Mexico and California, which they hoped later to erect into slave states. This bit of history gives us a glimpse of the humor of Abraham Lincoln, and reveals his keen insight into political methods. He divined that the war would be waged in the interest of the institution of slavery, and that therefore it would terminate in a