For example, Congress had scarcely assembled when attacks began on the establishment of civil governments in California and New Mexico. With such unusual strength of vision it could readily be seen that Polk had been indulging in some villainy there. For a week or so excitement raged. But after a while several things appeared. Our only aim had been to mitigate the harshness of military rule, about which the kindly Whigs had felt much exercised. The action complained of had been taken under a military sanction, and was proper legally as well as by common sense, for the Executive, as commander-in-chief, possessed the fullest military authority in regions occupied by our arms. Harrison, a Whig, had proceeded after a similar fashion in Canada during the War of 1812; and our Supreme Court had even endorsed the view of a Whig lawyer, Daniel Webster by name, that British occupation of Castine, Maine, during the same war gave England rights of sovereignty there for the time being. So far as Kearny, a Whig officer, had gone wrong, the fault had been his own; and, finally, the unholy word "conquest," which had made the Whigs most unhappy when applied by Polk to the occupation of New Mexico, was found to have been applied to the British occupation of Castine by our own Supreme Court.[1]
Behind idealistic declamation lay schemes that were distinctly practical. It was thought, for example, that if the war could be made odious, and the government's measures be hindered in Congress, Polk would have to placate the Whigs by restoring the protective tariff. This came out beautifully in the treatment of the proposal to lay a duty on tea and coffee, which even the National Intelligencer endorsed. A Democrat, "Long John"' Wentworth of Illinois, fully as noted for corporeal as for spiritual grandeur, and wrathful over Polk's course in the Oregon and river and harbor affairs, moved the rejection of the plan, and the Whigs fell into line.[2]
It was a noble scene. Regard for the poor man filled the mouths of the orators. Though his cottons, his sugar and his salt had been cheerfully made to pay, this duty would be "inhuman," a "tax on poverty," a tax "against the fireside and against woman," a tax "against the wages of weary labor" to support the "extravagance" of the "Tiberius" in the White House. But almost in the same breath came the hint, "If the
