dropping the Oregon issue. A general sense that southern | politicians had been overbearing prevailed above the line. The fear that southern domination would blight interests dear to the North exerted its usual strength; and as a final merit, the Proviso helped to make the war odious by suggesting that it aimed to extend slavery.[1]
So without regard to the logic of the situation, the welfare of the country or the needs of our armies it was urged; and then Calhoun made a profit in his turn by bringing in a series of proslavery dogmas to rally the southerners under his banner. The northern Whigs, for reasons just mentioned, and particularly to save themselves at home, took up the Proviso, and it fared well; but after a time the party discovered that favoring it might cost them several states in the next Presidential contest, and so the New Commandment was quietly filed away.[2]
To replace it, however, calm the "Proviso men," and avert a party split by preventing the emergence of a slavery issue, the "patriotic sublimity"' of the Whigs evolved another idea. This was the proposition of Senator Berrien that no territory should be taken from Mexico, and that while it would be "desirable"' to have the Texas boundary settled and our claims paid, we should always be ready to make terms that would leave Mexican honor "inviolate." Here was truly a remarkable proposition. By voting three millions to facilitate a settlement with Mexico, in full view of Polk's grounds for proposing that measure, Congress had already committed itself to the principle of acquiring territory.[3]
But other objections to Berrien's plan far outweighed the point of consistency. If the United States was to decide what would satisfy Mexican honor, the plan could only have proved futile — even insulting; and if Mexico herself, it was ludicrous. Nothing would have satisfied Mexico's ideas of honor except the evacuation of her territory and the surrender of Texas. When convinced by the passage of this resolution that she had nothing to lose in the end, she would have felt still less anxiety to sacrifice her daily golden egg — the money that our armies paid out — by ending the war. Implying that she had done nothing worthy of stripes, Berrien turned the war Message and the war bill into falsehoods, and accused the United States of a horrible crime — the crime of warring upon an innocent neighbor
