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Government not only refused to receive him (the envoy of the United States), or to listen to his propositions, but, after a long-continued series of menaces, has at last invaded our territory and shed the blood of our fellow-citizens on our own soil. Resolved, By the House of Representatives, that the President of the United States be respectfully requested to inform this House,

Ist. Whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his message declared, was or was not within the territory of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819, until the Mexican revolution.

2d. Whether that spot is or is not within the territory which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary government of Mexico.

3d. Whether that spot is or is not within a settlement of people, which settlement has existed ever since long before the Texas revolution, and until its inhabitants fled before the approach of the United States army.

4th. Whether that settlement is or is not isolated from any and all other settlements by the Gulf and the Rio Grande on the south and west, and by wide uninhabited regions on the north and east.

5th. Whether the people of that settlement, or a majority of them, or any of them, have ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas or of the United States, by consent or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying tax, or serving on juries, or having process served upon them, or in any other way.

6th. Whether the people of that settlement did or did not flee from the approach of the United States army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops, before the blood was shed, as in the message stated; and whether the first blood, so shed, was or was not shed within the inclosure of one of the people who had thus fled from it.

7th. Whether our citizens, whose blood was shed, as in his message declared, were or were not, at that time, armed officers and soldiers, sent into that settlement by the military order of the President, through the Secretary of War.

8th. Whether the military force of the United States was or was not so sent into that settlement after General Taylor had more than once intimated to the War Department, that, in his opinion, no such movement was necessary to the defense or protection of Texas.

1848

January 1st. There is a good deal of diversity among the Whigs, as to who shall be their candidate for the Presidency, but I think it will result in favor of General Taylor.

As to Mr. Graham's application for a Lieutenancy, I have already submitted it to the President in the best way I could think of to give it chance of success. I wrote him about it; and do not know anything more that I can do for him. I can have no intimacy with the President, which might give me personal influence over him.

Lincoln begins to learn the ways of Congress which has formalities that are new to him.

5th. (From the Congressional Globe.) Mr. Lincoln said he had made an effort, some few days since, to obtain the floor in relation to this measure (resolution requiring the Postmaster General to make new arrangement for carrying the mails), but had failed. One of the objects he had then had in view was now in a great measure superseded by what had fallen from the gentleman from Virginia who had just taken his seat. He begged to assure his friends on the other side of the House that no assault whatever was meant upon the Postmaster General; and he was glad that what the gentleman had now said, modified to a great extent by the impression which might have been created by the language he had used on a previous occasion. He wanted to state to gentlemen who might have entertained such impressions, that the Committee on the Post Office was composed of five Whigs and four Democrats, and

their report was understood as sustaining, not impugning, the position taken by the Postmaster General. That report had met with the approbation of all the Whigs and of all the Democrats also, with the exception of one, and he wanted to go even further than this. (Intimation was informally given Mr. L. that it was not in order to mention on the floor what had taken place in committee.) He then observed that if he had been out of order in what he had said, he took it all back so far as he could. He had no desire, he could assure gentlemen, ever to be out of order-though he never could keep long in order.

8th. (To William H. Herndon.) As to speech-making, by way of getting the hang of the House I made a little speech two or three days ago on a post-office question of no general interest. I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing. I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court. I expect to make one within a week or two in which I hope to succeed well enough to wish you to see it.

It is very pleasant to learn from you that there are some who desire that I should be reelected. I most heartily thank them for their kind partiality; and I can say, as Mr. Clay said of the annexation of Texas, that "personally I would not object" to a reelection, although I thought at the time, and still think, it would be quite as well for me to return to the law at the end of a single term. I made the declaration that I would not be a candidate again, more from a wish to deal fairly with others, to keep peace among our friends and to keep the district from going to the enemy, than for any cause personal to myself; so that, if it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again. But to enter myself as a competitor of others, or to authorize any one so to enter me, is what my word and honor forbid.

After a year in Congress Lincoln tries his hand formulating the Whig doctrine that the President is a rascal but the war must be carried through.

12th. (In the United States House of Representatives.) Mr. Chairman: Some, if not all, the gentlemen on the other side of the House who have addressed the committee within the last two days, have spoken rather complainingly, if I have rightly understood them, of the vote given a week or ten days ago declaring that the war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President. I admit that such a vote should not be given in mere party wantonness, and that the one given is justly censurable, if it have no other or better foundation. I am one of those who joined in that vote; and I did so under my best impression of the truth of the case. How I got this impression, and how it may possibly be remedied, I will now try to show. When the war began, it was my opinion that all those who because of knowing too little, or because of knowing too much, could not conscientiously oppose the conduct of the President (in the beginning of it), should, nevertheless, as good citizens and patriots, remain silent on that point, at least till the war should be ended. Some leading Democrats, including ex-President Van Buren, have taken this same view, as I understand them; and I adhered to it and acted upon it, until since I took my seat here; and I think I should still adhere to it were it not that the President and his friends. will not allow it to be so. Besides the continual effort of the President to argue every silent vote given for supplies into an indorsement of the justice and wisdom of his conduct; besides that singularly candid paragraph in his late message in which he tells us that Congress with great unanimity (only two in the Senate and fourteen in the House dissenting), had declared that "by the act of the Republic of Mexico, a state of war exists between that Government and the United States," when

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