ional policy of the Jackson administration,
by that infatuation of Northern sympathy with Southern interests,
which Mr. Appleton points out to our notice, and the true purposes
of which had already been sufficiently divulged in an address of Mr.
Clement C. Clay to the Legislature of Alabama. But there was another
more hidden impulse to this extreme solicitude for the recognition
of the independence of Texas working in the free states, quite as
ready to assume the mask and cap of liberty as the slave-dealing
champions of the rights of man. The Texan land and liberty jobbers
had spread the contagion of their land-jobbing traffic all over the
free states throughout the Union. Land-jobbing, stock-jobbing,
slave-jobbing, rights-of-man-jobbing, were all, hand in hand,
sweeping over the land like a hurricane. The banks were plunging
into desperate debts, preparing for a universal suspension of specie
payment, under the shelter of legislative protection to flood the
country with irredeemable paper. Gambling speculation was the
madness of the day; and, in the wide-spread ruin which we are now
witnessing as the last stage of this moral pestilence, Texan bonds
and Texan lands form no small portion of the fragments from the
wreck of money corporations contributing their assets of two or
three cents to the dollar. All these interests furnished vociferous
declaimers for the recognition of Texan independence."

Mr. Adams next states the proceedings of Congress on this subject during
the whole of the residue of the Jackson administration, terminating with
the recognition by Congress of the independence of Texas. At this period
Mr. Van Buren--a Northern man with Southern principles--assumed the
functions of President of the United States. But the recognition of the
independence of Texas availed nothing without her annexation to the
United States. In October, 1837, a formal proposition from the Republic
of Texas for such annexation was communicated to Congress, with the
statement that it had been declined by Mr. Van Buren. But the passion
for the annexation of Texas was not to be so disconcerted. Memorials for
and against its annexation poured into Congress, and were referred to
the Committee on Foreign Affairs. "In the debate which arose from their
report," says Mr. Adams, "I exposed the whole system of duplicity and
perfidy towards Mexico, which had mark