Indiana has had some experience in foreign affairs, being a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, I should think that the subject was entirely new and foreign to his mind. His attempt to compare the case he just cites, of a dispatch informing a foreign Government that a certain act will be looked upon as an unfriendly one, with the orders given in this case to sink or capture ships, with due respect to him I cannot refrain from calling positively ludicrous. There is no resemblance between the two cases. No complaint is made in this case of any dispatch that may have been sent to the Haytian Government through the accredited Minister there. But complaint is made of this: that the Executive gave orders to a rear-admiral of the United States to commit belligerent acts against a foreign Power, in a foreign country, and is taking an active part in its internal conflicts, without the authority of Congress.
I have shown the Senator from Indiana clearly from the dispatches issuing from the State Department at the same time, with relation to the same subject, that the use of armed force at the discretion of the President was not the intent and purpose of those proceedings in the Texas case. The Senator from Massachusetts calls my attention to another letter from Mr. Calhoun, in which he says:
Should the exigency arise to which you refer in your note to Mr. Upshur, I am further directed by the President to say that during the pendency of the treaty of annexation he would deem it his duty to use the means placed within his power by the Constitution to protect Texas from all foreign invasion.—Senate Documents, Twenty-eighth Congress, first session, vol. 5, page 349.
And what those means confided to him by the Constitution are is explicitly and clearly enough stated in the dispatches to Mr. Nelson and Mr. Murphy.
