and embarrassing for us to go for General Taylor.
The declaration that we have always opposed the war is true or false,
according as one may understand the term "oppose the war." If to say "the
war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President"
by opposing the war, then the Whigs have very generally opposed it.
Whenever they have spoken at all, they have said this; and they have said
it on what has appeared good reason to them. The marching an army into the
midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away,
leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may
appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does
not appear so to us. So to call such an act, to us appears no other than
a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly. But if, when
the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the giving
of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support of the
war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war. With few
individual exceptions, you have constantly had our votes here for all the
necessary supplies. And, more than this, you have had the services, the
blood, and the lives of our political brethren in every trial and on
every field. The beardless boy and the mature man, the humble and the
distinguished--you have had them. Through suffering and death, by disease
and in battle they have endured and fought and fell with you. Clay and
Webster each gave a son, never to be returned. From the State of my
own residence, besides other worthy but less known Whig names, we sent
Marshall, Morrison, Baker, and Hardin; they all fought, and one fell, and
in the fall of that one we lost our best Whig man. Nor were the Whigs
few in number, or laggard in the day of danger. In that fearful, bloody,
breathless struggle at Buena Vista, where each man's hard task was to beat
back five foes or die himself, of the five high officers who perished,
four were Whigs.

In speaking of this, I mean no odious comparison between the lion-hearted
Whigs and the Democrats who fought there. On other occasions, and
among the lower officers and privates on that occasion, I doubt not the
proportion was different. I wish to do justice to all. I think of all
those brave men as Americans, in whose proud fame, as an American, I too
have a share. Many of them, Whigs and Democrats are my constituents and
personal friends; and I