the time to talk freely of the
disruption of the Union. If Texas were annexed, the East would secede;
if it were not annexed, the South would secede. Van Buren, the head of
the Democratic party, and Clay, the master of the Whigs, exerted all
their influence in 1844 to avoid the expected conflict. But President
Tyler, without close party affiliations and standing in need of an
issue, was ready to take the risk. Radical expansionists, supported by
substantial economic interests in the South, urged the immediate
annexation of Texas, while Adams and twenty-one of his colleagues from
the restless sections of the North declared that the addition of the new
region to the Union would be equivalent to a dissolution of the ties
which held the warring sections together;[5] and they published, in May,
1843, a formal address to their constituents calling upon them to
secede. The members of Congress who signed this address represented the
districts, almost without exception, in which abolition had won a
footing.

[Footnote 5: See chap. _VII_, pp. 126-127.]

The important question was: Should the East remain passive while the
annexation of "another Louisiana" was being consummated and thus allow
herself to be submerged.

Charles Sumner, an ambitious young man, an intellectual kinsman of
Wendell Phillips, one of those "transcendentalists" of Massachusetts of
whom the country was to hear a great deal in the future, answered this
question in his famous "grandeur-of-nations" oration of July 4, 1845.
The elite of Boston had gathered for the occasion in Tremont Temple, and
they had invited the officers of a warship then lying in the harbor, the
local military men, and others who took pride in the martial deeds of
their ancestors, to join in the accustomed celebration of the Fourth.
Dressed in gay, super-fashionable attire, the young Sumner poured forth
in matchless language a denunciation of war, of military and naval
armaments, of President Polk and the party in power, which drove one
half of his audience frantic with resentment and anger. "There is no war
which is honorable, no peace which is dishonorable," he declared at the
outset, and for two hours he massed his arguments and statistics to
prove the thesis. The conservatives of Boston declared that it would be
the last of the young man. But Garrison and Phillips had raised up
another recruit. The oration which had insulted half of those who heard
it was published in edition after ed