Whig House, over which Mr. Winthrop presided, it
was found impossible to repeat the vote during the preparations
for the national contest then impending. The treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo, by which we acquired a vast territory from Mexico, was
ratified by the Senate, and the House voted the fifteen millions
demanded by it without adding a restriction of any kind on the
subject of slavery. Every acre of the nine hundred thousand square
miles was free territory while under the rule of Mexico, and the
Commissioners of that government were extremely anxious that the
United States should give a guaranty that its character in this
respect should not be changed. They urged that to see slavery
recognized upon soil once owned by Mexico would be so abhorrent to
that government as it would be to the United States to see the
Spanish Inquisition established upon it. Mr. Nicholas F. Trist,
the American commissioner, gave a reply which a free Republic reads
with increasing amazement. He declared that if the territory
proposed to be ceded "were increased tenfold in value, and, in
addition to that, covered a foot thick with pure gold, on the single
condition that slavery should be forever excluded," he would not
"entertain the offer for a moment, nor even think of sending it to
his government. No American President would dare to submit such
a treaty to the Senate."

With this suppression, if not indeed re-action, of the popular
feeling in the North, on the subject of slavery, the two great
parties approached the Presidential election of 1848. Each was
under peculiar embarrassment in the selection of a candidate, and
the presentation of the principles on which support was to be asked.
The anomaly presented in the Congressional election of 1846, where
an administration conducting a successful war was defeated before
the people, promised to be repeated. The Democratic party had
precipitated the war, had organized the military force that prosecuted
it, had controlled its immense patronage, and had brought it to a
victorious conclusion, yet had gained no political strength in the
country. The two gallant soldiers who had so largely shared, if
indeed they had not absorbed, its glory, were Whigs, and both were
in ill-humor with the administration. After the battle of Buena
Vista, Taylor's victorious progress had been checked and his army
crippled by orders from Washington, which reduced his force, and
turned the Regulars over to Sco