so.  I had nothing to do with the Florida treaty, or the admission of Florida.  My opinion remains unchanged, that it was not within the original scope or design of the Constitution to admit new States out of foreign territory; and, for one, whatever may be said at the Syracuse Convention, or at any other assemblage of insane persons, I never would consent, and never have consented, that there should be one foot of slave territory beyond what the old thirteen States had at the time of the formation of the Union.  Never, never!  The man cannot show his face to me, and say he can prove that I ever departed from that doctrine.  He would sneak away, and slink away, or hire a mercenary press to cry out, What an apostate from liberty Daniel Webster has become!  But he knows himself to be a hypocrite and a falsifier.

But, Gentlemen, I was in public life when the proposition to annex Texas to the United States was brought forward.  You know that the revolution in Texas, which separated that country from Mexico, occurred in the year 1835 or 1836.  I saw then, and I do not know that it required any particular foresight, that it would be the very next thing to bring Texas, which was designed to be a slave-holding State, into this Union.  I did not wait.  I sought an occasion to proclaim my utter aversion to any such measure, and I determined to resist it with all my strength to the last.  On this subject, Gentlemen, you will bear with me, if I now repeat, in the presence of this assembly, what I have before spoken elsewhere.  I was in this city in the year 1837, and, some time before I left New York on that excursion from which I returned to this place, my friends in New York were kind enough to offer me a public dinner as a testimony of their regard.  I went out of my way, in a speech delivered in Niblo’s Saloon, on that occasion, for the purpose of showing that I anticipated the attempt to annex Texas as a slave territory, and said it should be opposed by me to the last extremity.  Well, there was the press all around me,—­the Whig press and the Democratic press.  Some spoke in terms commendatory enough of my speech, but all agreed that I took pains to step out of my way to denounce in advance the annexation of Texas as slave territory to the United States.  I said on that occasion:—­

“Gentlemen, we all see that, by whomsoever possessed, Texas is likely to be a slave-holding country; and I frankly avow my entire unwillingness to do any thing that shall extend the slavery of the African race on this continent, or add other slave-holding States to the Union.  When I say that I regard slavery in itself as a great moral, social, and political evil, I only use language which has been adopted by distinguished men, themselves citizens of slave-holding States.  I shall do nothing, therefore, to favor or encourage its further extension.  We have slavery already amongst us.  The Constitution found it in the Union; it recognized it, and gave it solemn