supplies sixty-seven in the House, and not fourteen merely, voted against it; besides this open attempt to prove by telling the truth what he could not prove by telling the whole truth-demanding of all who will not submit to be misrepresented, in justice to themselves, to speak out, besides all this, one of my colleagues [Mr. Richardson] at a very early day in the session brought in a set of resolutions expressly indorsing the original justice of the war on the part of the President.  Upon these resolutions when they shall be put on their passage I shall be compelled to vote; so that I cannot be silent if I would.  Seeing this, I went about preparing myself to give the vote understandingly when it should come.  I carefully examined the President’s message, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point.  The result of this examination was to make the impression that, taking for true all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone further with his proof if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him.  Under the impression thus made I gave the vote before mentioned.  I propose now to give concisely the process of the examination I made, and how I reached the conclusion I did.  The President, in his first war message of May, 1846, declares that the soil was ours on which hostilities were commenced by Mexico, and he repeats that declaration almost in the same language in 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.”