ing all there is between those
rivers that it is just one hundred and fifty-two feet long by fifty feet
wide, and no part of it much within a hundred miles of either. He has a
neighbor between him and the Mississippi--that is, just across the street,
in that direction--whom I am sure he could neither persuade nor force to
give up his habitation; but which nevertheless he could certainly annex,
if it were to be done by merely standing on his own side of the street and
claiming it, or even sitting down and writing a deed for it.

But next the President tells us the Congress of the United States
understood the State of Texas they admitted into the Union to extend
beyond the Nueces. Well, I suppose they did. I certainly so understood it.
But how far beyond? That Congress did not understand it to extend clear
to the Rio Grande is quite certain, by the fact of their joint resolutions
for admission expressly leaving all questions of boundary to future
adjustment. And it may be added that Texas herself is proven to have had
the same understanding of it that our Congress had, by the fact of the
exact conformity of her new constitution to those resolutions.

I am now through the whole of the President's evidence; and it is a
singular fact that if any one should declare the President sent the army
into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people who had never submitted,
by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the United States,
and that there and thereby the first blood of the war was shed, there is
not one word in all the which would either admit or deny the declaration.
This strange omission it does seem to me could not have occurred but by
design. My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and
there I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's
neck in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog,
and cover up with many words some point arising in the case which he dared
not admit and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear
so, but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still
does appear to me that just such, and from just such necessity, is the
President's struggle in this case.

Sometime after my colleague [Mr. Richardson] introduced the resolutions I
have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and interrogations,
intended to draw the President out, if possible, on this hitherto
untrodden ground. To show their rele