nt Meade, and half a dozen other voices instantly
agreed with him as to the perils surrounding the small besieged
garrison.

It was hardly possible, they said, that it could hold out until the
arrival of the main army. This, too, would have to fight all the way
against superior numbers, but that was a thing which it could do, and
they were all wild with eagerness to be on the march, in answer to the
summons of those far-away guns.

There were no railroads to speak of, and only the first small beginnings
of telegraphs in the year 1846. The news of the first fighting would
therefore be slow in reaching the President and Congress at Washington,
so that they might lawfully make what is called a formal declaration of
war. Much had already been taken for granted, but the American
government was at that hour anxiously leaning southward and listening
for the expected roar of Mexican cannon. It came, as rapidly as General
Taylor could send it. A swift despatch-boat, with all her canvas up,
went speeding across the gulf to New Orleans. Thence, in the hands of
special couriers, it would gallop all the remaining distance. Meantime,
the struggle at the Rio Grande frontier would continue, just as if all
the legal arrangements had been made, but it would be weeks before
Europe could be advised of what was going on. All this, too, when this
fight over the annexation of Texas was about to lift the Republic into a
foremost place among the nations. It was to give her all the Pacific
coast which she now has, except Oregon and Alaska, with the gold of
California and the silver of the mountains. Among its consequences were
to be the terrible Civil War, the abolition of slavery, the acquisition
of the Sandwich Islands, and many another vast change in the history of
our country and in that of these very European nations which were then
ignorantly sitting still and thinking little about it, because they had
no ocean cable telegraphs to outrun the swift clipper ships.

There were couriers racing inland in all directions to tell the people
of Mexico, also, that war had come, but the despatches of the general
commanding their forces on the Texas border were carried by a swift
schooner from Matamoras, on the coast, directly to Vera Cruz. A
messenger from that port had before him a gallop of only two hundred and
sixty miles to the city of Mexico. President Paredes, therefore, had
full information of the attack on the American fort sooner than did