Before this was done, the election of 1844 had taken place. In the Democratic convention Robert J. Walker, an avowed annexationist, prevented the nomination of Van Buren, and secured that of James K. Polk. The Whigs tried their fortunes with Henry Clay. Basing his campaign entirely on annexation, which he heartily favored, Polk secured a plurality over Clay, and a heavy electoral majority. On March 1, 1845, three days before Polk was inaugurated, Congress passed the joint resolution providing for annexation.

According to this Texas was to be admitted to the union on the following terms: any boundary questions were to be subject to adjustment by the United States government; Texas was to cede to the United States all public buildings, ports, and harbors, and to keep its debts, with its public land, as a means for paying them. With the consent of the inhabitants, additional states might be formed out of Texas.

The majority of Texans desired annexation, and in June the Texas Congress voted to accept the terms. In December, 1845, the Congress of the United States admitted Texas into the union as a state. Under international law, the United States was justified in taking that action. Texas had been independent for nine years, during which time Mexico gave proof of inability to reëstablish her authority in the province. As a sovereign nation, Texas had as much right to dispose of her own destinies as the United States had in 1792, nine years after winning independence. If Texas wished to join the United States, that government had a perfect right to admit her.

OREGON

Just about a year after the annexation of Texas, the United States and Great Britain finally reached a satisfactory settlement of the Oregon question. This was the region, almost imperial in extent, lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, and bounded on the north and south by the parallels 42° and 54° 40'. Spain had originally claimed the whole Pacific coast, but she never settled north of California. Russia at one time claimed the coast as far south as the site of San Francisco, and in 1821 as far as the fifty-first parallel. From 1790 on England had a claim to the territory, based on the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790, signed by England and Spain. The claims of the United States dated back to 1792, when Captain

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Gray had explored a part of the Columbia River. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition, sent out by Jefferson to look over the Louisiana Purchase, followed the Columbia toward its mouth. In 1811 John Jacob Astor, a New York fur merchant, founded the trading post of Astoria. Although the British captured this during the War of 1812, the Treaty of Ghent restored it to the United States. By the Florida Treaty of 1819, Spain surrendered all her rights north of California to the United States. Left in joint possession, the United States and Great Britain had not been able

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to come to any agreement concerning the division of the territory. In 1818, the two governments signed a treaty providing for joint occupation for ten years. During that time subjects of both

powers were to be free to use the territory on equal terms. In 1824 the Russians relinquished their claims to any of the region. south of 54° 40'. In 1826, Great Britain and the United States renewed their negotiations, in order to establish a satisfactory dividing line. The United States suggested the extension of the forty-ninth parallel, the line between Canada and the United States from the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, but the British refused to agree. The following year the arrangement for joint occupation was continued indefinitely, with the understanding that it might be terminated by either party on one year's notice.

During this period the British government left Oregon to the Hudson Bay Company. Under its auspices widely separated furtrading posts were established, and no settlement of any kind was permitted within one hundred miles of any of these stations. The Americans might have done the same thing, with equal right, but there was no company sufficiently interested. To most people Oregon

was too far off to bother with. Even Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, champion of the West though he was, prophesied that the Rockies would be the permanent western boundary of the United States. During the period of joint control there were probably ten times as many British and Canadians as Americans in Oregon.

In 1836 some American missionaries, H. H. Spaulding and Marcus Whitman, began work among the Oregon Indian tribes. Two years later the movement began that finally forced a decision regarding the boundary between American and British Oregon. Senator Lewis F. Linn of Missouri tried to impress upon his colleagues the importance of Oregon. Late in 1841 he introduced a bill, providing for a line of forts from Missouri to Oregon, and for the grant of a whole section of land to every male emigrant eighteen years of age or over. In 1843 this Linn Bill passed the Senate, by a vote of twenty-four to twenty-two, but the House failed to pass it. Confidently expecting that it would go through, and stimulated by the prospect of free land, a thousand pioneers moved into the territory in 1843. In 1842 Marcus Whitman returned to Boston, the headquarters of his Missionary Society, to urge his superiors not to abandon the work in Oregon. Successful in his appeal, he went back to Oregon the following year, with one of the bands of emigrants. Years after Whitman's death some highly imaginative person invented the story that Whitman's journey east had been for the purpose of laying the Oregon situation before President Tyler, in an effort to save the territory for the United States. According to this story, Whitman made a masterly appeal, which deeply affected Tyler, and the federal government began to encourage emigration. Such is the famous "Whitman myth," which makes Whitman the savior of Oregon for the United States. Long since abandoned by historical scholars, it was never entirely given up by the Congregational Board of Home Missions.

The Democratic platform of 1844 asserted that the American title to the whole of Oregon was "clear and unquestionable," and urged the reoccupation of Oregon, as well as the reannexation of Texas. By that time American interest in Oregon was developing, and the slogan of "fifty-four forty or fight" became popular. Although President Polk had been inclined to favor the "whole of Oregon" he authorized his Secretary of State, Buchanan, to renew the offer of the forty-ninth parallel. The British minister refused this. Polk then

advised Congress to permit him to give the necessary one year's notice for terminating the joint agreement.

That was done, and due notice was transmitted to the British government. In June, 1846, the British minister in Washington submitted the draft of a proposed treaty, providing for the forty-ninth parallel to the strait, but giving Vancouver to Great Britain. Polk felt that the treaty was fair, but he asked the Senate for advice before formally submitting it to that body. Its recommendation was favorable. The treaty was then signed, and the Senate ratified, by a vote of forty-one to fourteen.

When Congress proceeded to organize the Oregon territory, an attempt was made to prohibit slavery there. The first bill failed, and a new one was introduced, providing for a nonslave territory, on the ground that it was north of the Missouri Compromise line, 36° 30'. That failed, as did a third Oregon bill, which would have let the settlers there decide the question for themselves. A fourth bill, which finally passed, left Oregon a free territory, and Polk signed the measure, giving as his reason the fact that it was north of the Compromise line.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE WAR WITH MEXICO

While the abolitionists were denouncing the annexation of Texas because it meant the addition of another slave state, the Whigs were doing the same thing, some of them because they saw in expansion an additional source of trouble between the sections, some because the step was taken under Tyler's direction. Elected as a Whig, he was looked upon as a deserter from his party, and whatever he did was greeted with a storm of protest. But the abolitionist and Whig denunciations over Texas were nothing as compared with their uproar over the war with Mexico. From that day almost to this, Polk has been variously described as a scoundrel and a robber.

MEXICAN HOSTILITY

The fundamental cause of the war was the annexation of Texas. Mexico had steadily refused to recognize the independence of her lost province, and with at least the virtue of consistency she denied the right of the United States to her new acquisition. In 1843, nearly two years before the joint resolution passed Congress, Santa Anna served the following warning upon the United States: "the Mexican government will consider equivalent to a declaration of war against the Mexican Republic the passage of an act for the incorporation of Texas into the territory of the United States; the certainty of the fact being sufficient for the immediate proclamation of war." Later in the same year the Mexican minister in Washington declared that "if the United States should, in defiance of good faith and of the principles of justice . . . commit the unheard-of act of violence of appropriating to themselves an integrant part of the Mexican territory,... he will consider his mission ended, seeing that, as the Secretary of State will have learned, the Mexican Government is resolved to declare war so soon as it receives information of such an act."

After Congress had passed the joint resolution, the Mexican minis