elf unable to
say much against the great additions to our domain which the treaty had
secured. We paid fifteen millions, in addition to our territorial
indemnity claim, and we got a realm whose wealth could not be computed.
So much, it must be owned, did fortune do for that singular favorite,
Mr. Polk. And, curiously enough, the smoke had hardly cleared from Palo
Alto field before Abraham Lincoln, a young member in the House of
Congress, was introducing a resolution which asked the marking of "the
spot where that outrage was committed." Perhaps it was an outrage. Many
still hold it so. But let us reflect what would have been Lincoln's life
had matters not gone just as they did.

With the cessions from Mexico came the great domain of California. Now,
look how strangely history sometimes works out itself. Had there been
any suspicion of the discovery of gold in California, neither Mexico nor
our republic ever would have owned it! England surely would have taken
it. The very year that my treaty eventually was ratified was that in
which gold was discovered in California! But it was too late then for
England to interfere; too late then, also, for Mexico to claim it. We
got untold millions of treasure there. Most of those millions went to
the Northern States, into manufactures, into commerce. The North owned
that gold; and it was that gold which gave the North the power to crush
that rebellion which was born of the Mexican War--that same rebellion by
which England, too late, would gladly have seen this Union disrupted, so
that she might have yet another chance at these lands she now had lost
for ever.

Fate seemed still to be with us, after all, as I have so often had
occasion to believe may be a possible thing. That war of conquest which
Mr. Calhoun opposed, that same war which grew out of the slavery tenets
which he himself held--the great error of his otherwise splendid public
life--found its own correction in the Civil War. It was the gold of
California which put down slavery. Thenceforth slavery has existed
legally only _north_ of the Mason and Dixon line!

We have our problems yet. Perhaps some other war may come to settle
them. Fortunate for us if there could be another California, another
Texas, another Oregon, to help us pay for them!

I, who was intimately connected with many of these less known matters,
claim for my master a reputation wholly different from that given to him
in any garbled "history" of his life