The Works of Daniel Webster, Volume 1. Daniel Webster
in common with the body of his political friends, in and out of Congress, he abstained from all factious opposition, and all measures calculated to embarrass the government. The supplies were voted for by him, but he never ceased to urge upon the President to pursue a magnanimous policy toward the distracted and misgoverned country with which we had been brought in collision. Nor did his opinions of the character of the war lead him to discourage the inclination of his younger son, Mr. Edward Webster, to accept a commission in the regiment of Massachusetts cxlvii Volunteers. This young gentleman had evinced an energy beyond his years, and practical talent of a high order, as a member of the commission for marking the boundary line between Maine and the British Provinces under the treaty of Washington. His friends looked forward with confidence to his running a brilliant military career. These hopes, like those which accompanied so many other gallant and patriotic spirits to the scene of action, were destined to be early blasted. Major Webster fell a victim to the labors and exposures of the service, and to the climate of the country, under the walls of Mexico.
To avoid all misconception, it may be proper to state that Mr. Webster has at all times entertained an unfavorable opinion of the various administrations by which Mexico, almost ever since her revolution, has been successively misgoverned. He has felt constrained to regard the greater part of them as military factions, bent more upon supplanting each other than upon promoting the welfare of their country. He was fully aware of the justice of many of the complaints of citizens of the United States for wrongs inflicted and justice withheld. Both while in the executive government himself, and as a member of Congress, he had uniformly expressed himself in terms of severe condemnation of the conduct of the Mexican government in withholding or delaying redress; and he foresaw and foretold that, in obstinately refusing to recognize the independence of Texas, she was laying up for herself a store of consequences the most humiliating and disastrous. Nothing but the most deplorable infatuation could have led the government of Mexico to suppose, that, after the independence of Texas had been recognized by the United States, Great Britain, France, and Belgium, it would be possible for a power as feeble as that of Mexico to reduce the rebellious province to submission. If any confirmation of these statements is needed, it may be found in Mr. Webster’s letter to Mr. de Bocanegra, in the sixth volume of this collection.
The settlement of the controversy with England relative to the boundary of Oregon was effected in the first year of Mr. Polk’s administration. The foundations for this adjustment had long been laid; in fact, as long ago as the administration of Mr. Monroe, the United States had offered to England the obvious basis of the extension of the forty-ninth degree of latitude cxlviii to the Pacific. Great Britain allowed herself to be influenced by the Hudson’s Bay Company so far, as to insist upon following the course of the Columbia down to the sea. She even took the extravagant ground that, although the United States, by the Louisiana and Florida treaties, combined the Spanish and the French titles with that of actual contiguity and prior discovery of the Columbia River, they had no exclusive title to any portion of the territory, but that it was all subject to her own joint and rival claim. This unreasonable pretension brought the two countries to the verge of war. The Baltimore Convention, in the year 1844, set up a claim, equally unreasonable, to the whole of the territory. President Polk in his inaugural message, quoting the words of the resolution of the Baltimore Convention, pronounced our title to the territory to be “clear and unquestionable.”
The assertion of these opposite extremes of pretension happily resulted in the final adjustment on the forty-ninth degree. Mr. Webster had uniformly been of opinion that this was the fair basis of settlement. Had he supposed that an arrangement could have been effected on this basis with Lord Ashburton, he would gladly have included it in the treaty of Washington. After Mr. Webster’s retirement from the Department of State, it is stated by President Polk that Mr. Upshur instructed Mr. Everett to offer that line to the British government; but the negotiation had in the mean time, by the appointment of Mr. Pakenham, been transferred to Washington. The offer of the forty-ninth degree of latitude was renewed to Mr. Pakenham, but accompanied with conditions which led him to decline it, and to express the hope that the United States would make “some further proposal for the settlement of the Oregon question more consistent with fairness and equity, and with the reasonable expectations of the British government.” The offer thus injudiciously rejected was withdrawn by the administration. In this dangerous juncture of affairs, the following incidents occurred, which we give in the words of the “London Examiner”:
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