inion could not be restrained, and meetings were called to
reconsider the instructions of their delegations to the Baltimore
Convention; nor were the Southern Whigs less anxious about the outcome,
though the party as a whole acquiesced in Clay's wish that Texas should
be eliminated from their forthcoming platform.

At this point Robert J. Walker, Senator from Mississippi, a shrewd
little man who had gone to the Southwest eighteen years before to make
his fortune, assumed the management of the Democratic party. A bold land
speculator and an able lawyer, connected with the powerful Dallas and
Bache families in Pennsylvania, he quickly rose to a commanding position
in his State and was sent to the United States Senate, where he soon
made himself felt as the most radical representative of Southern and
Western interests, urging the rapid removal of the Indians beyond the
western frontiers, free homesteads for all who would go West, and the
immediate annexation of Texas. An intimate friend of Van Buren, a
persistent opponent of Calhoun, and a rival of Benton for national
honors, Walker published on Jackson Day, January 8, 1844, a letter to
the public which was immediately reprinted in the newspapers of the
South and West, and which in pamphlet form had a very wide circulation.
In this letter he came out boldly for the "reannexation of Texas and the
reoccupation of Oregon,"--all Oregon. His rhetorical language and his
defiance of England gained the public ear on both Texas and Oregon,
while his shrewd suggestions of commercial expansion in the Pacific won
powerful support in New York and Boston. But the greatest stroke of this
publication was the apparent Southern demand for all Oregon, and before
the Van Buren-Clay "self-denying ordinances" appeared, Walker was
forging the union of South and West on the proposition, reannexation of
Texas and reoccupation of Oregon, and maneuvering in Washington for what
was later called the "bargain of the Baltimore Convention." Walker's
relations with the Pennsylvania leaders gave him a strong position in
that great Democratic community, and he soon secured the support of
Thomas Ritchie, the master politician in Virginia. When the Democrats
met, late in May, the "little Senator" was in perfect control. He
renewed and vitalized the rule of the Democratic party whereby the
candidate must secure two thirds of all votes cast in order to receive
the nomination. He procured the passage of this reso