each successive annual
message, thus showing that he deems that point a highly essential one. In
the importance of that point I entirely agree with the President. To
my judgment it is the very point upon which he should be justified, or
condemned. In his message of December, 1846, it seems to have occurred to
him, as is certainly true, that title-ownership-to soil or anything else
is not a simple fact, but is a conclusion following on one or more simple
facts; and that it was incumbent upon him to present the facts from which
he concluded the soil was ours on which the first blood of the war was
shed.

Accordingly, a little below the middle of page twelve in the message last
referred to, he enters upon that task; forming an issue and introducing
testimony, extending the whole to a little below the middle of page
fourteen. Now, I propose to try to show that the whole of this--issue and
evidence--is from beginning to end the sheerest deception. The issue, as
he presents it, is in these words: "But there are those who, conceding all
this to be true, assume the ground that the true western boundary of Texas
is the Nueces, instead of the Rio Grande; and that, therefore, in marching
our army to the east bank of the latter river, we passed the Texas line
and invaded the territory of Mexico." Now this issue is made up of two
affirmatives and no negative. The main deception of it is that it assumes
as true that one river or the other is necessarily the boundary; and
cheats the superficial thinker entirely out of the idea that possibly
the boundary is somewhere between the two, and not actually at either. A
further deception is that it will let in evidence which a true issue would
exclude. A true issue made by the President would be about as follows: "I
say the soil was ours, on which the first blood was shed; there are those
who say it was not."

I now proceed to examine the President's evidence as applicable to such an
issue. When that evidence is analyzed, it is all included in the following
propositions:

(1) That the Rio Grande was the western boundary of Louisiana as we
purchased it of France in 1803.

(2) That the Republic of Texas always claimed the Rio Grande as her
eastern boundary.

(3) That by various acts she had claimed it on paper.

(4) That Santa Anna in his treaty with Texas recognized the Rio Grande as
her boundary.

(5) That Texas before, and the United States after, annexation had
exercised jurisdict