to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us.  So to call such an act, to us appears no other than a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly.  But if, when the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the giving of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support of the war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war.  With few individual exceptions, you have constantly had our votes here for all the necessary supplies.  And, more than this, you have had the services, the blood, and the lives of our political brethren in every trial and on every field.  The beardless boy and the mature man, the humble and the distinguished—­you have had them.  Through suffering and death, by disease and in battle they have endured and fought and fell with you.  Clay and Webster each gave a son, never to be returned.  From the State of my own residence, besides other worthy but less known Whig names, we sent Marshall, Morrison, Baker, and Hardin; they all fought, and one fell, and in the fall of that one we lost our best Whig man.  Nor were the Whigs few in number, or laggard in the day of danger.  In that fearful, bloody, breathless struggle at Buena Vista, where each man’s hard task was to beat back five foes or die himself, of the five high officers who perished, four were Whigs.

In speaking of this, I mean no odious comparison between the lion-hearted Whigs and the Democrats who fought there.  On other occasions, and among the lower officers and privates on that occasion, I doubt not the proportion was different.  I wish to do justice to all.  I think of all those brave men as Americans, in whose proud fame, as an American, I too have a share.  Many of them, Whigs and Democrats are my constituents and personal friends; and I thank them,—­more than thank them,—­one and all, for the high imperishable honor they have conferred on our common State.

But the distinction between the cause of the President in beginning the war, and the cause of the country after it was begun, is a distinction which you cannot perceive.  To you the President and the country seem to be all one.  You are interested to see no distinction between them; and I venture to suggest that probably your interest blinds you a little.  We see the distinction, as we think, clearly enough; and our friends who have fought in the war have no difficulty in seeing it also.  What those who have fallen would say, were they alive and here, of course we can never know; but with those who have returned there is no difficulty.  Colonel Haskell and Major Gaines, members here, both fought in the war, and both of them underwent extraordinary perils and hardships; still they, like all other Whigs here, vote, on the record, that the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President.  And even General Taylor himself, the noblest Roman of them all, has declared that as a citizen, and particularly as a soldier, it is sufficient for him to know that his country is at war with a foreign nation, to do all in his power to bring it to a speedy and honorable termination by the most vigorous and energetic operations, without inquiry about its justice, or anything else connected with it.