the Mississippi and Bravo rivers. But what was our claim? Why it was that La Salle, having discovered the mouth of the Mississippi, and France having made a settlement at New Orleans, France had a right to one half the seacoast from the mouth of the Mississippi to the next Spanish settlement, which was Vera Cruz. The mouth of the Rio Bravo was about half way from the Balize to Vera Cruz; and so as grantees, from France of Louisiana, we claimed the Rio del Norte, though the Spanish settlement of Santa Fe was at the head of that river. France, from whom we had received Louisiana, utterly disclaimed ever having even raised such a pretension. Still we made the best of the claim that we could, and finally yielded it for the Floridas, and for the line of the forty-second degree of latitude from the source of the Arkansas river to the South Sea. Such was our claim; and you may judge how much confidence Mr. Monroe could have in its validity. The great object and desire of the country then was to obtain the Floridas. It was General Jackson's desire; and in that conference with me to which I have heretofore alluded, and which it is said he does not recollect, he said to me that so long as the Florida rivers were not in our possession, there could be no safety for our whole southern country.

But, sir, suppose you should annex Texas to these United States; another year would not pass before you would have to engage in a war for the conquest of the island of Cuba. What is now the condition of the island?-Still under the nominal protection of Spain. And what is the condition of Spain herself? Consuming her own vitals in a civil war for the succession of the crown. Do you expect, that whatever may be the issue of that war, she can retain even the nominal possession of Cuba? After having lost all her continental colonies in North and South America, Cuba will stand in need of more efficient protection; and above all, the protection of a naval power. Suppose that naval power should be Great Britain. There is Cuba at your very door; and if you spread yourself along a naked coast, from the Sabine to the Rio Bravo, what will be your relative position towards Great Britain, with not only Jamaica, but Cuba, and Porto Rico in her hands, and abolition for the motto to her union cross of St. George and St. Andrew? If by the utter imbecility of the Mexican confederacy, this revolt of Texas should lead immediately to its separation from that republic, and its annexation to the United States, I believe it impossible that Great Britain should look on, while this operation is performing, with indifference. She will see that it must shake her own whole colonial power on this continent, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Carribbean seas, like an earthquake; she will see, too, that it endangers her own abolition of slavery in her own colonies. A war for the restoration of slavery, where it has been abolished, if successful in Texas, must extend over all Mexico; and the example will threaten her with imminent danger of a war of colors in her own islands. She will take possession of Cuba and of Porto Rico, by cession from Spain, or by the batteries from her wooden walls; and if you ask her by what authority she has done it, she will ask you, in return, by what authority you have extended your seacoast from the Sabine to the Rio Bravo. She will ask you a question more perplexing, namely—by what authority you, with freedom, independence, and democracy upon your lips, are waging a war of extermination to forge new manacles and fetters, instead of those which are falling from the hands and feet of man. She will carry emancipation and abolition with her in every fold of her flag; while your stars, as they increase in numbers, will be overcast with the murky vapors of oppression, and the only portion of your banners visible to the eye, will be the blood-stained stripes of the task master!

Mr. Chairman, are you ready for all these wars? A Mexican war? a war with Great Britain, if not with France? a general Indian war? a servile war? and as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil war? For it must ultimately terminate in a war of colors as well as of races. And do you imagine that while with your eyes open you are wilfully kindling, and then closing your eyes and blindly rushing into them; do you imagine that while, in the very nature of things, your own southern and southwestern states must be the Flanders of these complicated wars, the battle-field upon which the last great conflict must be fought between slavery and emancipation; do you imagine that your congress will have no constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of slavery, in any way, in the states of this confederacy? Sir, they must and will interfere with it-perhaps to sustain it by war; perhaps to abolish it by treaties of peace; and they will not only

possess the constitutional power so to interfere, but they will be bound in duty to do it by the express provisions of the constitution itself. From the instant that your slaveholding states become the theatre of war, civil, servile, or foreign, from that instant the war powers of congress extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way by which it can be interfered with, from a claim of indemnity for slaves taken or destroyed, to the cession of the state burdened with slavery to a foreign power.

Sir, it is by virtue of this same war power, as now brought into exercise by this Indian war in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, that I vote for the resolution before the committee. By virtue of this, I have already voted in the course of this session to increase your standing army by a second regiment of dragoons, to authorize your President to accept the services of ten thousand volunteers, and to appropriate millions of the public money to suppress these Indian hostilities-all for the common defence, all for the general welfare. And if, on this occasion, I have been compelled to avail myself of the opportunity to assign my reasons for voting against the first resolution reported by the slavery committee, it is because it was the pleasure of the majority of the House this morning to refuse me the permission to assign my reasons for my vote, when the question was put upon those resolutions themselves. Sir, it is a melancholy contemplation to me, and raises fearful forebodings in my mind, when I consider the manner in which that report and those resolutions have been disposed of by the House. I have twice asked permission of this House to offer two resolutions calling for information from the President upon subjects of infinite importance to this question of slavery, to our relations with Mexico, and to the peace of the country. When I last made the attempt, a majority of the House voted by yeas and nays to suspend the rules to enable me to offer one of the two resolutions but the majority not amounting to two-thirds, my resolution has not yet obtained from the House the favor of being considered. Had it been the pleasure of the House to indulge the call, or to allow me the privilege of assigning my reasons for my vote on the resolution this morning, the remarks that I have now made might have been deemed more appropriate to those topics of discussion, than to the question more immediately now before the committee. They are reflections, however, which I deem it not less indispensable to make, than they are painful to be made extorted from me by a condition of public affairs unexampled in the history of this country. Heretofore, calls upon the executive department for information, such as that which I have proposed to make, were considered as among the rights of the members of this House, which it was scarcely deemed decent to resist. A previous question, smothering all discussion upon resolutions reported by a committee, affecting the vital principles of the Constitution, moved by one of the members who reported the resolutions, and sustained by the members of that committee itself, is an occurrence which never before happened in the annals of this government.

The adoption of those resolutions of the House had not even been moved. Upon the mere question whether an extra number of the reports of the committee should be printed, a member moves the recommitment of the report, with instructions to report a new resolution. On this motion the previous question is moved, and the Speaker declares that the main question is not on the motion to recommit, not on the motion to print an extra number of copies of the report, but upon the adoption of three resolutions, reported, but never even moved in the House. If this is to be the sample of our future legislation, it is time to awake from the delusion, that freedom of speech is among the rights of the members of the minority of this House.

Little reason have the inhabitants of Georgia and of Alabama to complain that the government of the United States has been remiss or neglectful in protecting them from Indian hostilities; the fact is directly the reverse. The people of Alabama and Georgia are now suffering the recoil of their own unlawful weapons. Georgia, sir, Georgia, by trampling upon the faith of our national treaties with the Indian tribes, and by subjecting them to her state laws, first set the example of that policy which is now in the process of consummation by this Indian war. setting this example, she bade defiance to the authority of the government of the nation; she nullified your laws; she set at naught your executive guardians of the common Constitution of the land. To what extent she carried this policy, the dungeons of her prisons and the records of the Supreme Judicial Court of the ited States can tell. To those prisons she committed inoffensive, innocent, pious

In

ministers of the gospel of truth, for carrying the light, the comforts, and the consolations of that gospel to the hearts and minds of these unhappy Indians. A solemn decision of the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced that act a violation of your treaties and of your laws. Georgia defied that decision; your executive government never carried it into execution; the imprisoned missionaries of the gospel were compelled to purchase their ransom from perpetual captivity, by sacrificing their rights as freemen to the meekness of their principles as Christians; and you have sanctioned all these outrages upon justice, law, and humanity, by succumbing to the power and the policy of Georgia, by accommodating your legislation to her arbitrary will; by tearing to tatters your old treaties with the Indians, and by constraining them, under peine forte et dure, to the mockery of signing other treaties with you, which, at the first moment when it shall suit your purpose, you will again tear to tatters and scatter to the four winds of heaven, till the Indian race shall be extinct upon this continent, and it shall become a problem, beyond the solution of antiquaries and historical societies, what the red man of the forest was.

This, sir, is the remote and primitive cause of the present Indian war; your own. injustice, sanctioning and sustaining that of Georgia and Alabama. This system of policy was first introduced by the present administration of your national government. It is directly the reverse of that system which had been pursued by all the preceding administrations of this government under the present Constitution. That system consisted in the most anxious and persevering efforts to civilize the Indians; to attach them to the soil upon which they lived; to enlighten their minds, to soften and to humanize their hearts; to fix in permanency their habitations; and to turn them from the wandering and precarious pursuits of the hunter, to the tillage of the ground, to the cultivation of corn and cotton; to the comforts of the fireside; to the delights of home. This was the system of Washington and of Jefferson, steadily pursued by all their successors, and to which all your treaties and all your laws of intercourse with the Indian tribes were accommodated. The whole system is now broken up; and instead of it you have adopted that of expelling by force or by compact, all the Indian tribes from their own territories and dwellings, to a region beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Missouri, beyond the Arkansas, bordering upon Mexico; and there you have deluded them with the hope that they will find a permanent abode-a final resting place from your never ending rapacity and persecution. There you have undertaken to lead the willing and to drive the reluctant, by fraud or by force: by treaty, or by the sword and the rifle; all the remnants of the Seminoles, of the Creeks, of the Cherokees, of the Choctaws, and of how many other tribes I cannot now stop to enumerate. In the process of this violent and heartless operation, you have met with all the resistance which men in so helpless a condition as that of the Indian tribes could make. Of the immediate causes of the war we are not yet fully informed; but I fear you will find them, like the remoter causes, all attributable to yourselves. It is in the last agonies of a people, forcibly torn and driven from the soil which they had inherited from their fathers, and which your own example, and exhortations, and instructions, and treaties, had riveted more closely to their hearts; it is in the last convulsive struggles of their despair, that this war has originated; and if it brings with it some portion of the retributive justice of heaven upon our own people, it is our melancholy duty to mitigate, as far as the public resources of the national treasury will permit, the distress of the innocent of our own kindred and blood, suffering under the necessary consequences of our own wrong. I shall vote for the resolution.*Speech in the House of Representatives, May, 1836.

This speech was delivered without premeditation or notes. No report of it was made by any of the usual reporters for the newspapers. Mr. Adams has written it out himself, from recollection, at the request of several of his friends, for publication. It is, of course, not in the precise language used by him in the House. There are some amplifications of the arguments which he used, and, perhaps, some omissions which have escaped his recollection. The substance of the speech is the same.

9

[The Arms on the coin of the MEXICAN REPUBLIC, are FREEDOM's Eagle destroying the Serpent-Tyranny; and its reverse bears the Cap of LIBERTY, diffusing its radiance universally.]

[The following brief extracts confirm Mr. Adams' opinion, that Great Britain is not indifferent to this monstrous outrage on the laws of nature and of nations.]

LONDON PATRIOT.

The British public ought to be made aware of what is going on at present in Texas; of the true cause and the true nature of the contest between the Mexican authorities and the American slave-jobbers.

Texas has long been the Naboth's vineyard of brother Jonathan. For twenty years or more, an anxiety has been manifested to push back the boundary of the United States' territory, of which the Sabine river is the agreed line, so as to include the rich alluvial lands of the delta of the Colorado, at the head of the Gulf of Mexico. There are stronger passions at work, however, than the mere lust of territory-deeper interests at stake. Texas belongs to a republic which has abolished slavery; the object of the Americans is to convert it into a slaveholding state; not only to make it the field of slave cultivation, and a market for the Maryland slave-trade, but, by annexing it to the Federal Union, to strengthen in congress the preponderating influence of the southern slaveholding states.

This atrocious project is the real origin and cause of the pretended contest for Texian independence-a war, on the part of the United States, of unprovoked aggression for the vilest of all purposes.-July 6, 1836.

HOUSE OF COMMONS-August 6.

TEXAS.

Mr. B. Hoy rose to bring forward the motion of which he had given notice. It was on a subject of the utmost importance to the cause of humanity, of immense importance to our colonial possessions, and to our merchants who had embarked seventy millions of dollars in Mexico. If the United States were suffered to wrest Texas from Mexico, would not Cuba, and other Mexican possessions, fall a prey to the United States? The war now going on in Texas was a war not for independence, but for slavery; and he would contend, that should the revolt in Texas be successful, that province would still be bound by the treaty Mexico entered into with this country when Texas formed part of the Mexican dominions, to prevent the carrying on of the slave-trade within its territory; the number of states in the Union had originally been thirteen; they were now increased to twenty-six, and if Texas were added to the Union, there could be no doubt the basis of the connection would be to establish slavery and the slave-trade permanently in that province. He begged to ask the noble lord opposite, Lord Palmerston, if within the last ten days he had not received an application from the Mexican government for the good offices of this country to remonstrate with the United States against the gross violation of treaties, and the aggressions of their southern states.

He was of opinion that England ought not only to remonstrate with America, but to have a naval force on the coast to support Mexico against American aggressions. The honorable member concluded by moving, "That an humble address be presented to the Crown, praying that his Majesty will be graciously pleased to direct that such measures be taken as to his Majesty may seem proper, to secure the fulfilment of the existing treaty between this country and Mexico, and to prevent the establishment of slavery and traffic in slaves, in the province of Texas, in the Mexican territory."

Mr. H. G. WARD seconded the amendment, which involved a subject upon which he had been long and was deeply interested. The importance of Texas was but little known in this house or by the country. The province itself consisted of a large tract of the finest land, it had numerous good and only two bad ports, and the possession of it would give to the parties obtaining it the full command of the whole Gulf of Mexico. The Mexican government on its first intercourse with this country, an intercourse of increased and still increasing commercial importance to