worthily used them in battle. The legislature may perform an acceptable service, by presenting to each discharged soldier of the first regiment his rifle and its accoutrements. It affords me great pleasure to make that recommendation.

Some embarrassment has been experienced in providing the necessary supplies for the volunteers. The government agents are not always at hand, and when present do not furnish all that is required. Considerable sums have been expended from time to time, and the accounts have been promptly settled at Washington when sent on. United States officers, acting in a subordinate capacity, would not settle demands, unless contracted within the clearly-defined limits of their legal authority. Hence, the state executive had first to pay them, and then look to the Secretary of War, who acts with a more comprehensive discretion, for repayment. Ten thousand dollars should be placed at the disposal of the governor to meet these demands in future.

It is foreign to the purposes of this communication, to consider the cause which produced the war, or the ends to be accomplished by it; but it has given momentum and present consequence to another question, in which our state has a very direct, local, and individual interest. In view of the possible acquisition of territory, by way of indemnity, the House of Representatives of the United States declared, by a large vote, that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in any territory hereafter to be acquired by, or annexed to, the United States, except for crimes whereof the party shall have been first duly convicted." The sentiment has been taken up by many of the non-slaveholding states, and by distinguished men of both the great political parties. Virginia, in a series of resolutions, indited with perspicuity and the calmness of conscious rectitude, has assumed the true national position on this question. These resolutions, together with a copy of my reply thereto, made in the absence of the legislature, and addressed to the Governor of Virginia, are herewith transmitted.

Territory acquired by the joint effort of the states, must be the property of all the states, and any attempt by the free states to exclude the slaveholding states from a full participation in the ownership and occupancy of it, would be as preposterous as if the latter were to assume, through the agency of Congress, to establish the institution of slavery throughout such acquired territory. The might of the free states does not carry with it the right to legislate against the slave states. Ours is not a consolidated government, ruled by the power of majorities not strictly controlled by the federal constitution, but it is a confederation of states, in which the rights of each state are reserved to itself, except in so far as for the general good, they have been delegated to the confederation. The power to legislate in regard to slavery has not been delegated, and therefore does not belong to the federal government, but remains with the states respectively. The question in the territories, it seems to me, must be left, as in the states, to be settled by the people who inhabit them. A state, by its municipal regulations, may exclude slavery, but it is not pretended that Congress can do so. Where does the federal power derive its authority to exclude it from the territory? A man's slave is his property, so recognised by the Constitution, and so declared by the highest courts of the country; and a citizen of Missis

sippi may settle with his slave property in the territory of the United States, with as little constitutional hindrance as a citizen from any other state may settle with any other species of property. The same power that could exclude a Mississippian with his slaves could exclude a New Yorker with his merchandise.

New states, asking admission into the Union, are to be introduced upon terms of equality with the original states. Congress must take care that they have a republican form of government, and that their constitutions do not conflict with that of the United States; and here the power to direct and control them ceases. No other and extraordinary conditions are to be imposed upon them. Each state, for herself, as she enters the Union, must decide whether she will take her position with the free or slave states of the Union. If an anti-slavery majority in Congress may, by the mere force of that majority, exclude slavery from a territory, and thus prepare the way for making her, in the end, a free state, why may not a pro-slavery majority force slaves upon the territory, and thus make it a slave state? And if the opponents of slavery may deny to a new state admission into the Union, until she excludes slavery from her limits, why may not the friends of slavery exclude such applicant until she admit and establish the institution of slavery? The southern slaveholder has never undertaken to exclude the northern antislavery man from a full share in the ownership and enjoyment of all the territory in the United States. He has never undertaken to control the settlement of such territory, always admitting the right of each new state to regulate her own domestic institutions; he has never sought to exclude such state because she prohibited slavery-yet, we are met with unceasing efforts to exclude slavery from the territories; to deny the slave owner the right to go with his property into such territory, and to close the doors of the Union against the admission of slave states. Need it be asserted that such attempts are violative of the Constitution, and in derogation of the rights of the states, and of the people? It is no reply to say, that the free states are the strong party, and that a majority must rule. The voice of a majority, unsustained by the Constitution, is utterly powerless. Majorities may pass enactments in violation of the Constitution, but they can impose no corresponding obligations on the minority to obey them. They may attempt to exact obedience by force-the attempt, so far as it succeeds, will be tyranny and oppression, and, if persisted in, will result in revolution. For, whenever the will of a majority supersedes the restrictions of the Constitution, and the rights of the states and individuals possess no other guarantee than such as are yielded to them by the strong party, our federal government will have ceased to be one of confederated states, and each member must assume its original, sovereign, and independent position. Whether we shall be forced to this extremity, depends upon the councils which shall govern at Washington. It becomes our state, menaced as she is with a serious and unauthorized restriction of her present rights, and an ultimate overthrow of her domestic institutions, to assume her position, and publicly to declare and make known the course she will feel constrained to pursue, sooner than submit to such tyranny and oppression. She should take her position with the calm dignity of determined resistance, and maintain it with all the pertinacity

of one who knows her rights, and knowing dares defend them. The hope is, therefore, earnestly expressed, that the legislature will take our position into serious consideration, and, after mature reflection, place the state in such attitude before the Union and the world on this subject, as that her conduct, whatever it may be, shall have the unqualified approval of every man, at home and abroad, who loves the country and reveres the Constitution.

No other subject of general interest presents itself to my mind as worthy of special notice.

In transmitting to the two Houses of the legislature this my last general communication, and being about to close an official connection with the state which has existed for four years, the occasion is embraced to tender my grateful thanks to the people and their representatives for the generous manner in which they have treated the errors of my administration. If the condition of the state has been improved, and the general welfare promoted, the credit is due to the people and their officers, who have acted together for this desirable end. Guided by the wisdom which is from on high, all interests have harmonized in bringing about an improved state, of our public affairs; and it is gratifying to know that the same course hereafter, under the guidance of Divine Providence, will lead us to that high destiny which awaits our state in the no distant future.

We should never cease to remember the dependence we owe to our Father which is in Heaven, and our prayers should continually ascend, that He may vouchsafe to us wisdom in our deliberations, and a pure patriotism in the performance of every act involving the welfare of our beloved country.

EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, January 3d, 1848.

A. G. BROWN.

THE WAR WITH MEXICO.

In the House of Representatives, February 10, 1848, in Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, on the bill to authorize a loan not exceeding eighteen million five hundred thousand dollars-Mr. BROWN, of Mississippi, said :—

I AM aware, Mr. Chairman, that I am to speak under many disadvantages. The committee have manifestly grown weary of this discussion; and nothing less than such a speech as that with which we have been entertained by the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Marsh] will now interest them. The speech was beautiful in its conception, and chaste in its delivery; and though, to my mind, illogical in its deductions, and erroneous in its conclusions, it arrested the profound attention of the committee. If I had selected my own position, I should not have chosen to follow such a speech, it not being my purpose to reply to it. The difficulty in obtaining the floor has imposed on me the necessity of speaking when I am permitted, and not when I desired to do so.

The opinions of my constituents constitute a part of the grand aggregate of public sentiment in regard to the Mexican war; and both they and their representative have a reasonable anxiety that these opinions may be included when the general account current with public opinion comes to be made up on this subject.

We believe the war to have been just and constitutional in its commencement; that it has been vigorously prosecuted thus far, for wise and proper ends; and that it should be so prosecuted, until we have the amplest reparation for past wrongs, and the fullest security that our rights as a nation are to be respected in future. To this end, we are prepared to vote such number of troops, and such additional sums of money as, in the judgment of the commander-in-chief, may be necessary to attain these objects.

The gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Marsh] has said that the annexation of Texas was the cause of the war, and I agree with him. War, he says, was not the necessary result of annexation, and again I agree with him. It was no just cause of complaint with Mexico, that we annexed Texas to the United States. This, to my mind, is clear; and yet, if we had not had annexation, we should have had no war. Mexico may have destroyed our property, murdered our people, insulted our flag, and violated her treaty stipulations, as she had done for many long years, and such is our love of peace, that we would have borne it all with patience, and waited for reparation on the tedious process of negotiation with a nation proverbial for being slow in making treaties, and swift to violate them after they are made. But when Mexico came upon our soil, in all the panoply of war, burning our houses, plundering and murdering our people before our face, threatening desolation to the country, and menacing our little army with a total overthrow, we began at last to think of war. The old leaven of 1776 began to work-the spirit of 1812, which had been dormant for more than thirty years, awoke from its slumbers; still we only thought of war. Mexico threatened, but we looked for peace. Point Isabel had been set on fire, Cross was murdered, Thornton and his command were captured and borne off in triumph, and yet we had no war. A Mexican army threatened to attack General Taylor in his camp, and yet war lingered in the lap of peace. At length, a Mexican general, at the head of a Mexican army, boldly threw himself across the path of our forces, and hurling defiance in their teeth, disputed their march at the mouth of the cannon. Two bloody conflicts (in both of which, Mexico, true to her national instincts, fired the first gun, and made the first retreat) were the consequences. And after all this, we are told that we commenced the war.

The President, it is said, commenced the war by ordering the army into Mexico, and by his subsequent "unnecessary and unconstitutional' orders to General Taylor to advance and take a position on the Rio Grande. Let us examine these orders, their dates, their contents, and the circumstances under which they were issued-not as partisans, intent on gaining advantage for the one or the other party, but as patriots, as the representatives of a free people, who love justice as much as they love their country. But before we do this, let us examine into the history of that Texas, the annexation of which produced the war, to the end that we may fully appreciate the justice of the complaint urged with

so much vehemence and ill blood by Mexico against it. Having admitted that the annexation (however unjustly made so) was the cause of the war, I should fail in doing justice to the President, improperly charged as he is, by a vote of this House, with bringing the country into a state of war "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally," if I did not note the precise agency which he had in the transaction. As a private citizen he gave his opinion in favor of it, as did hundreds of thousands all over the Union. I shall not pause to inquire how far his views may have influenced his countrymen, or to what extent an expression of them influenced his fellow-citizens, in calling him from private life to preside over the destinies of this great nation. The conviction has taken deep root in the public mind, that the expression of opinions adverse to those of Mr. Polk defeated the nomination to the presidency of one distinguished man before a convention of his party, and the election of another by the people. From all of which, I have concluded that Mr. Polk did not lead, but followed public sentiment on this subject. The sin of the President is not (if I am right in this) that he led, but that he followed, his countrymen into a false position, if false it was. The responsibility rests, therefore, where I hope responsibility in this country may always rest on all questions of vital interest, with the people-the people who demanded annexation-the people who never did and never will shirk the responsibility of their own act-the people who will, if permitted, fight out this war to a speedy and honorable issue—the people who will supply all the means, both in men and money, and in the end, in defiance of opposition here or elsewhere, demand and obtain just and honorable terms of Mexico. They will settle their accounts in their own way, not only with Mexico, but with their representatives here, meting out justice to whom it is due.

Annexation, I have said, was no just cause of war. In this I but concur in opinion with the eloquent gentleman who preceded me. I am glad, too, to find myself sustained in this by another of New England's sons-a man to whom I know many thousands of his countrymen look for counsel, and on whose accents they hang as upon the words of inspiration-a man who not only speaks but thinks for a large number of people, who do their thinking, as princes sometimes do their wooing, by proxy. Mr. Webster is reported to have said, in a late speech on this subject: "And I go further; I say that, in my judgment, after the events of 1836 and the battle of San Jacinto, Mexico had no reason to regard Texas as one of her provinces. She had no power in Texas; but it was entirely at the disposition of those who lived in it. They made a government for themselves. This country acknowledged that government, foreign states acknowledged that government; and I think, in fairness and honesty, we must admit, that in 1840, '41, '42, and '43, Texas was an independent state among the states of the earth. I do not admit, therefore, that it was any just ground of complaint on the part of Mexico that the United States annexed Texas to themselves." Let us now, Mr. Chairman, look to the record, and see how far it justifies these conclusions. What was Texas at the period of annexation? A sovereign and independent republic. History so records her. The nations of the earth had so acknowledged her. She won her independence, as we won ours, on the battle-field. She maintained it, as we.