I am now through the whole of the President’s evidence; and it is a singular fact that if any one should declare the President sent the army into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people who had never submitted, by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the United States, and that there and thereby the first blood of the war was shed, there is not one word in all the which would either admit or deny the declaration.  This strange omission it does seem to me could not have occurred but by design.  My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client’s neck in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up with many words some point arising in the case which he dared not admit and yet could not deny.  Party bias may help to make it appear so, but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me that just such, and from just such necessity, is the President’s struggle in this case.

Sometime after my colleague [Mr. Richardson] introduced the resolutions I have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and interrogations, intended to draw the President out, if possible, on this hitherto untrodden ground.  To show their relevancy, I propose to state my understanding of the true rule for ascertaining the boundary between Texas and Mexico.  It is that wherever Texas was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and wherever Mexico was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and that whatever separated the actual exercise of jurisdiction of the one from that of the other was the true boundary between them.  If, as is probably true, Texas was exercising jurisdiction along the western bank of the Nueces, and Mexico was exercising it along the eastern bank of the Rio Grande, then neither river was the boundary:  but the uninhabited country between the two was.  The extent of our territory in that region depended not on any treaty-fixed boundary (for no treaty had attempted it), but on revolution.  Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.  This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—­a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.  Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it.  Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.  More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with or near about them, who may oppose this movement.  Such minority was precisely the case of the Tories of our own revolution.  It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both, and make new ones.