eized on
merchant ships and sold into slavery under local police regulations.
When Mr. Hoar visited Charleston as the accredited agent of his
State for the purpose of taking measures to test the constitutionality
of these regulations, the Legislature of South Carolina, by a vote
of one hundred and nineteen against one, passed a series of outrageous
resolutions culminating in a request to the Governor to expel him
from the State as a confessed disturber of the peace. He was
obliged summarily to depart, as the only means of escaping the
vengeance of the mob. This open and insolent defiance of the
national authority could not fail to strengthen anti-slavery opinion
in the Northern States. The same end was served by an unexpected
movement in New Hampshire. This State, like Massachusetts and
Vermont, had taken ground against annexation, but it wheeled into
line after Polk was nominated. John P. Hale, however, then a
Democratic member of Congress from that State, refused to follow
his party, and for this reason, after he had been formally declared
its choice for re-election, he was thrown overboard, and another
candidate nominated. No election, however, was effected, and his
seat remained vacant during the 29th Congress, but he obtained a
seat in the Legislature in 1846, and the following year was chosen
United States Senator, while Amos Tuck, afterward a prominent Free
Soiler, was elected to the Lower House of Congress. These were
pregnant events, and especially the triumph of Hale, who became a
very formidable champion of freedom, and a thorn in the side of
slavery till it perished.

In the meantime the hunger for immediate annexation had been whetted
by the election of Mr. Polk, and its champions hurried up their
work, and pushed it by methods in open disregard of the Constitution
and of our treaty obligations with Mexico. In the last hours of
the administration of John Tyler the atrocious plot received its
finishing touch and the Executive approval, and, in the apt words
of the ablest and fairest historian of the transaction, "the bridal
dress in which Calhoun had led the beloved of the slaveocracy to
the Union was the torn and tattered Constitution of the United
States." War with Mexico, as prophesied by the Whigs, speedily
followed. As early as August, 1845, General Taylor was ordered by
President Polk to advance to a position on the Nueces. In March
of the following year, in pursuance of further orders, hi