ereby the first blood of the war was shed, there is
not one word in all the which would either admit or deny the declaration.
This strange omission it does seem to me could not have occurred but by
design. My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and
there I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's
neck in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog,
and cover up with many words some point arising in the case which he dared
not admit and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear
so, but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still
does appear to me that just such, and from just such necessity, is the
President's struggle in this case.

Sometime after my colleague [Mr. Richardson] introduced the resolutions I
have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and interrogations,
intended to draw the President out, if possible, on this hitherto
untrodden ground. To show their relevancy, I propose to state my
understanding of the true rule for ascertaining the boundary between Texas
and Mexico. It is that wherever Texas was exercising jurisdiction was
hers; and wherever Mexico was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and that
whatever separated the actual exercise of jurisdiction of the one from
that of the other was the true boundary between them. If, as is probably
true, Texas was exercising jurisdiction along the western bank of the
Nueces, and Mexico was exercising it along the eastern bank of the Rio
Grande, then neither river was the boundary: but the uninhabited country
between the two was. The extent of our territory in that region depended
not on any treaty-fixed boundary (for no treaty had attempted it), but on
revolution. Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have
the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a
new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred
right--a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor
is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing
government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can
may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they
inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may
revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with or near about
them, who may oppose this movement. Such minority was precisely the case
of the