Mr. Ingersoll, rebuffed by the President, then made a personal explanation, alleging specifically that Mr. Webster had made an unlawful use of the secret service money, that he had employed it to corrupt the press, and that he was a defaulter.  Mr. Ashmun of Massachusetts replied with great bitterness, and the charges were referred to a committee.  It appeared, on investigation, that Mr. Webster had been extremely careless in his accounts, and had delayed in making them up and in rendering vouchers, faults to which he was naturally prone; but it also appeared that the money had been properly spent, that the accounts had ultimately been made up, and that there was no evidence of improper use.  The committee’s report was laid upon the table, the charges came to nothing, and Mr. Ingersoll was left in a very unpleasant position with regard to the manner in which he had obtained his information from the State Department.  The affair is of interest now merely as showing how deeply rooted was Mr. Webster’s habitual carelessness in money matters, even when it was liable to expose him to very grave imputations, and what a very dangerous man he was to arouse and put on the defensive.

Mr. Webster was absent when the intrigue and scheming of Mr. Polk culminated in war with Mexico, and so his vote was not given either for or against it.  He opposed the volunteer system as a mongrel contrivance, and resisted it as he had the conscription bill in the war of 1812, as unconstitutional.  He also opposed the continued prosecution of the war, and, when it drew toward a close, was most earnest against the acquisition of new territory.  In the summer of 1847 he made an extended tour through the Southern States, and was received there, as he had been in the West, with every expression of interest and admiration.

The Mexican war, however, cost Mr. Webster far more than the anxiety and disappointment which it brought to him as a public man.  His second son, Major Edward Webster, died near the City of Mexico, from disease contracted by exposure on the march.  This melancholy news reached Mr. Webster when important matters which demanded his attention were pending in Congress.  Measures to continue the war were before the Senate even after they had ratified the peace.  These measures Mr. Webster strongly resisted, and he also opposed, in a speech of great power, the acquisition of new territories by conquest, as threatening the very existence of the nation, the principles of the Constitution, and the Constitution itself.  The increase of senators, which was, of course, the object of the South in annexing Texas and in the proposed additions from Mexico, he regarded as destroying the balance of the government, and therefore he denounced the plan of acquisition by conquest in the strongest terms.  The course about to be adopted, he said, will turn the Constitution into a deformity, into a curse rather than a blessing; it will make a frame of government founded on the grossest inequality,