of the unhalting westward movement was the choice concerning slavery: the choice which had been debated very temperately at first when the great Ordinance for the government of the Northwest Territory was adopted in the days of the Confederation, but which had struck many a spark of passion out when handled again at the admission of Missouri into the Union, and which seemed every time it was touched more dangerous and disturbing than before. Now it seemed to lie everywhere at the front of affairs,-not the question of the abolition of slavery, but the question of its territorial extension. The men who had formed the Anti-Slavery Society were frank abolitionists; demanded much more than the mere limitation of the area of slavery; set themselves to make sentiment for its absolute destruction. But their ranks were sparsely filled, and their agitations did little but offend a practical, law-abiding people. Every man who knew aught of affairs knew the tenor of the constitution in that matter. Slavery within the States which were already members of the Union was an institution with which the federal government could have nothing to do, which no opinion even could touch or alter save the opinion of the States concerned a question of domestic law in respect of which the choice of each little commonwealth was sovereign and final. Had the full roster of the States been made up, agitators in Congress would have found themselves obliged to confine their attacks to the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the commerce in slaves between the States. But the full roster of the States was not made up: all the great Louisiana purchase remained to be filled with them; and with the making of every community there must come again this question ΙΟΙ of the freedom of labor or the extension of slavery. The fateful choice was always making and to be made. The Whig leaders were profoundly disturbed to see it thrust forward in very practical shape, made a thing to be faced squarely and at once, by the President whom they had undesignedly put into office. In April, 1844, Mr. Tyler sent to the Senate a treaty of annexation which he had negotiated with Texas.1 Secret negotiations, a piece of business privately carried to completion and made public only when finished, suited well with the President's temper and way of action. A man naturally secretive, naturally fond, not of concealments, but of quiet and subtile management, not insincere, but indirect in his ways of approach, he relished statecraft of this sort, and no doubt liked the Texan business all the better because it seemed to demand, in its very nature, a delicate and private handling. The Senate rejected the treaty by the very decisive vote of 16 to 35, men of both parties alike deeply irritated that the President should spring this weighty matter upon the country in such a fashion, taking no counsel beforehand save such as he chose to take. But the question, once put definitely forward, could not be thrust aside again. It was too vitally connected with the mastery of the continent, too plainly a thing which lay at the heart of western plans, to be put aside by vote of the Senate. It had come to be fought out as a party issue; and the Democrats were better prepared for it than the Whigs. They were at least capable of exercising choice. The Whig party was too curiously and too variously compounded to meet any new question without painful hesitation and deep embarrassment. Texas had sprung up, a young empire at the south west, within a decade. No doubt all the vast region which she claimed and dominated had in strict right been. a part of the broad, vague "Louisiana" which Mr. Jefferson had purchased of France in 1803; but the United States had yielded their claim to it in 1819, in order to secure all of Florida in the treaty with Spain. Mr. Adams, then Secretary of State, New Englander though he was, had wished to insist upon setting the southwestern boundary of the United States forward to the Rio Grande del Norte; but Mr. Monroe, the President, southerner though he was, had thought it best, as the rest of his cabinet did,-Mr. Crawford, of Georgia, Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina, and Mr. Wirt, of Virginia, among them,—that the East should not be so disquieted. "Having long known the repugnance with which the Eastern portion of the Union have seen its aggrandizement to the West and South," wrote Mr. Monroe to General Jackson, “I have been decidedly of the opinion that we ought to be content with Florida for the present." He had seen then that it was only "for the present"; and he had irritated the South and West more than he had pleased the East. By abandoning a full third of the Louisiana claim he had made the Missouri compromise of the next year (1820) no settlement at all, but merely a new point of departure in the struggle for the extension of slavery and the expansion of the South. In the drawing of that line of compromise the southern men had gained hardly so much as one fourth of what had been conceded to the northern interest, and the balance of power between the sections remained still to be redressed. Texas did not remain the property of Spain. While the treaty of 1819 lay unconfirmed at the dilatory court of Madrid, the people of Mexico broke away from their allegiance to the crown of Spain (1821) and established their independence, sweeping Texas within their dominion. In 1825 Mr. Adams offered Mexico a million dollars for the territory, but got nothing for his offer but the jealous distrust of the new government. General Jackson offered five millions for it, and only intensified the distrust. In 1827 the "State of Coahuila and Texas" became a member of the Mexican federal union. At first, to get increase of strength in her struggle with Spain, Mexico had encouraged immigration out of the United States. At first her law permitted slavery. When she grew fearful of the too strong desire of the United States for Texas she shut her doors, so far as law and ordinance could shut them, against immigrants out of the East. To win favor with the negroes of Hayti against Spain, she abolished slavery. But immigrants were not to be gainsaid; that long border could neither be watched nor guarded. Slaves came with their masters, too, and Mexican laws had to be suspended for the benefit of the Americans, who would not heed them. The masterful men who poured in across the long border came for the most part from the southern States. They found Mexican rule a thing sore to bear, arbitrary, inconstant, without principle, without stability of power. As their numbers increased, therefore, they made bold to take things into their own hands; framed a constitution for Texas which was to their own liking; and, when they could not obtain the sanction of the Mexican government for it, put it into operation without sanction (1833), making a revolution out of the right of local selfgovernment. In 1836, the government of Mexico being overturned and Santa Anna, its President, made dictator |