ng that Texas shall not go within five
leagues of her own boundary.

Next comes the evidence of Texas before annexation, and the United States
afterwards, exercising jurisdiction beyond the Nueces and between the two
rivers. This actual exercise of jurisdiction is the very class or quality
of evidence we want. It is excellent so far as it goes; but does it go far
enough? He tells us it went beyond the Nueces, but he does not tell us it
went to the Rio Grande. He tells us jurisdiction was exercised between
the two rivers, but he does not tell us it was exercised over all the
territory between them. Some simple-minded people think it is possible to
cross one river and go beyond it without going all the way to the next,
that jurisdiction may be exercised between two rivers without covering
all the country between them. I know a man, not very unlike myself, who
exercises jurisdiction over a piece of land between the Wabash and the
Mississippi; and yet so far is this from being all there is between those
rivers that it is just one hundred and fifty-two feet long by fifty feet
wide, and no part of it much within a hundred miles of either. He has a
neighbor between him and the Mississippi--that is, just across the street,
in that direction--whom I am sure he could neither persuade nor force to
give up his habitation; but which nevertheless he could certainly annex,
if it were to be done by merely standing on his own side of the street and
claiming it, or even sitting down and writing a deed for it.

But next the President tells us the Congress of the United States
understood the State of Texas they admitted into the Union to extend
beyond the Nueces. Well, I suppose they did. I certainly so understood it.
But how far beyond? That Congress did not understand it to extend clear
to the Rio Grande is quite certain, by the fact of their joint resolutions
for admission expressly leaving all questions of boundary to future
adjustment. And it may be added that Texas herself is proven to have had
the same understanding of it that our Congress had, by the fact of the
exact conformity of her new constitution to those resolutions.

I am now through the whole of the President's evidence; and it is a
singular fact that if any one should declare the President sent the army
into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people who had never submitted,
by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the United States,
and that there and th