rofessed to be for the annexation of Texas,
provided it could be accomplished without war with Mexico, which was
arrant nonsense, since Mexico had given notice that she would consider
annexation an act of war. The result of Clay's attitude, and of a
widespread distrust of his policies, was that Polk was elected by a
large majority.

His administration was destined to be a brilliant one, for Texas was at
once annexed, and the brief war with Mexico which followed, one of the
most successful ever waged by any country, carried the southwestern
boundary of the United States to the Rio Grande, and added New Mexico
and California to the national domain, while a treaty with England
secured for the country the present great state of Oregon, although here
Polk receded from his position and accepted a compromise which confined
Oregon below the forty-ninth parallel. But even this was something of a
triumph. With that triumph, the name of Marcus Whitman is most closely
associated, through a brilliant but rather useless feat of his, of which
we shall speak later on. Polk seems to have been an able and
conscientious man, without any pretensions to genius--just a good,
average man, like any one of ten thousand other Americans. He refused a
renomination because of ill-health, and died soon after retiring from
office.

The Democratic party had by this time become hopelessly disrupted over
the slavery question, which had become more and more acute. The great
strength of the state rights party had always been in the
South, and southern statesmen had always opposed any aggression on the
part of the national government. The North, on the other hand, had
always leaned more or less toward a strong centralization of power. So
it followed that while the Democratic party was paramount in the South,
its opponents, by whatever name known, found their main strength in the
North.

Yet, even in the North, there was a strong Democratic element, and, but
for the intrusion of the slavery question, the party would have
controlled the government for many years to come. But the North was
gradually coming to feel that the slavery question was more important
than the more abstract one of national aggression; the more so since, by
insisting upon the enforcement of such measures as the Fugitive Slave
Law, the South was, as it were, keeping open and bleeding a wound which
might to some extent have healed. In 1848 the split came, and the
Democratic party put