nted, that there
should be one foot of slave territory beyond what the old thirteen
States had at the time of the formation of the Union. Never, never! The
man cannot show his face to me, and say he can prove that I ever
departed from that doctrine. He would sneak away, and slink away, or
hire a mercenary press to cry out, What an apostate from liberty Daniel
Webster has become! But he knows himself to be a hypocrite and a
falsifier.

But, Gentlemen, I was in public life when the proposition to annex Texas
to the United States was brought forward. You know that the revolution
in Texas, which separated that country from Mexico, occurred in the year
1835 or 1836. I saw then, and I do not know that it required any
particular foresight, that it would be the very next thing to bring
Texas, which was designed to be a slave-holding State, into this Union.
I did not wait. I sought an occasion to proclaim my utter aversion to
any such measure, and I determined to resist it with all my strength to
the last. On this subject, Gentlemen, you will bear with me, if I now
repeat, in the presence of this assembly, what I have before spoken
elsewhere. I was in this city in the year 1837, and, some time before I
left New York on that excursion from which I returned to this place, my
friends in New York were kind enough to offer me a public dinner as a
testimony of their regard. I went out of my way, in a speech delivered
in Niblo's Saloon, on that occasion, for the purpose of showing that I
anticipated the attempt to annex Texas as a slave territory, and said it
should be opposed by me to the last extremity. Well, there was the press
all around me,--the Whig press and the Democratic press. Some spoke in
terms commendatory enough of my speech, but all agreed that I took pains
to step out of my way to denounce in advance the annexation of Texas as
slave territory to the United States. I said on that occasion:--

"Gentlemen, we all see that, by whomsoever possessed, Texas is
likely to be a slave-holding country; and I frankly avow my entire
unwillingness to do any thing that shall extend the slavery of the
African race on this continent, or add other slave-holding States
to the Union. When I say that I regard slavery in itself as a great
moral, social, and political evil, I only use language which has
been adopted by distinguished men, themselves citizens of
slave-holding States. I shall do nothing, t