Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845 Page: 5 of 56
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5
hered to by leading slave-holding politicians of both parties,
and that it thus became an available expedient to Mr. Tyler,
when, in his desperate circumstances, he was ready to seize
upon any project that might make him the centre of a new
alliance. Under his auspices, -through the efforts of Mr.
Upshur and Mr. Calhoun, -by a course of diplomacy the
most extraordinary and unwarrantable upon our records, a
treaty was concluded with Texas, and submitted to the
Senate for ratification. Its ratification was anxiously awaited
and pertinaciously urged, as the only constitutional mode
of final action upon the subject in the view of the friends of
annexation ; and when the ratification was refused, it was at
first the undivided impression upon the public mind throughout
the country, that the " vexed question " was finally and
effectually disposed of. Still, unprecedented, unauthorized,,
and wholly unjustifiable as had been the entire series of proceedings
connected with annexation, both in Texas and the
United States, before the negotiation of the treaty, and exceptionable
as was the treaty in the view of many who regarded
it as providing in a constitutional form for an unconstitutional
object, and who saw that it had been negotiated
under the most corrupting and compulsory influences, it was
reserved for the inadness of desperation, in the last resort, to
attempt and succeed in an artifice, which, had it been pro:
posed in advance, would not probably have found a sane advocate
throughout the Slave States, or even in Texas itself.,
The object of this artifice was to revive the treaty in the
shape of a joint resolution, introduced into the House of Representatives
upon the special recommendation of the President
!
Some of you must now remember, that, when we separated
from each other at the Faneuil Hall Convention, there werethose
who undertook to relieve our apprehensions of the certainty
of annexation by assuring us that "it could never be
brought to pass." At that time the joint resolution had just
been carried through the House of Representatives by a
hard-wrung vote. Intrigue and corruption, the party cabal,
the edict from the Hermitage, executive patronage, as exercised
alike by the President about to retire and the President
about to succeed him, had wrought their usual effect upon
the doe-faced, venal Democracy of the Free States, while a
few slave-holding Whigs, with their accustomed treachery in
every such exigency, were found ready, at the last moment,
not to follow in the rear, but to lead the van of the unholy alliance,
and to signalize themselves as the authors of the pro1
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Phillips, Stephen C. Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845, book, January 1, 1845; Boston. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth2361/m1/5/?rotate=90: accessed May 5, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.