estion was not
previously submitted to our national representatives. At that moment the
public mind was distracted between Mexico and England; but the Oregon
question nearly absorbed the apparently minor difficulties with our
restive neighbor. Congress contemplated the solemn probability of war
with one of the mightiest nations of our age, and even some of our
experienced statesmen,--as we have seen in the example of Mr.
Adams,--recommended the most stringent measures of armed occupation. At
such a crisis, and with a confidential knowledge of all our foreign
relations, it was the duty of the president to represent these matters
frankly to congress and to ask the opinion of his constitutional
advisers, as he subsequently did in the settlement of the dispute with
Great Britain. This prudent act would have saved the executive from
needless responsibility, whilst it indicated a sensitive devotion to the
behests of our constitution. Congress met whilst our troops were
encamped at Corpus Christi, as an army of observation, whose hostile,
though protective character, was unquestionable; yet our representatives
neither ordered its return nor refused it supplies. This denoted a
willingness to sanction measures which might either pacify Mexico, or
impose upon that republic the immediate alternative of war. It is not
improbable that congress would have adopted such a course, because,
according to the pretensions of Mexico, our troops had already invaded
her domains. This is an important view of the question which should not
be passed by silently. Mexico, it must be remembered, never relinquished
her right to reconquer Texas, but always claimed the _whole_ province as
her own, asserting a determination to regard its union with our
confederacy as justifiable cause of war. The joint-resolution, alone,
was therefore a belligerent act of the congress of the United States,
sufficient, according to the doctrine of Mexico, to compel hostile
retaliation. But, moreover, as the entire soil of Texas, from the Sabine
to the Nueces or Rio Grande was still claimed by Mexico as her
unsurrendered country, the landing of a single American soldier anywhere
south of our ancient boundary with Spain, was quite as hostile an
invasion of Mexican territory as the passage of our army from Corpus
Christi to Point Isabel.

Occasions upon which the eminent right of self protection has been
adopted as a principle of action in the United States, are not wanting