was the highest Whig leadership in what Webster called a "dark and troubled night."[1]
One idea in the minds of not a few who endorsed the "no territory" plan was that its adoption would render the prosecution of the war aimless, and so check it abruptly. Others favored gaining the same end by stopping supplies. Ex-Senator Rives, a leader of prominence, advised Crittenden to concert measures for this purpose with Democratic "patriots"; and in fact an understanding on the point seems to have been reached. "Be prompt, when you are wrong, to back straight out," urged the New York Tribune, demanding the recall of our troops. Other Whigs, after doing all they could to make the war aimless, argued, We are fighting for nothing, why persist? "Let us call home our armies," insisted Corwin. "Stop the war. Withdraw our forces," cried Sumner; and Corwin believed, early in February, 1847, that only two more votes would commit the Senate for this plan of complete national stultification, and for bringing back in a keenly aggravated state all our Mexican difficulties. Practically nobody dreamed of offering to Mexico the reparation that such an idea of dropping the war implied.' The proposition was therefore hollow and insincere; little more than politics weakly flavored with sentimentality.[2]
The month after Clay's chart appeared, the first session of the Thirtieth Congress assembled. About half the Representatives were new men, a majority belonged to the Whig party, and all had been chosen during the gloomy autumn of the previous year. By the Navigator and by other party leaders their work had been mapped out for them. The objects of the war were to be defined as at most a settlement of the Texas boundary at the Rio Grande, or a little farther north, and payment of the old American claims; supplies were to be qualified and limited accordingly, or entirely cut off; and in this manner hostilities would be ended.[3]
But politics, not principle, still dominated most of the Whigs. They viewed everything with reference to the impending election of a President; and public sentiment regarding the war had now changed. 'The battle of Buena Vista had aroused extraordinary enthusiasm; Scott's victories, refuting the charges of inefficiency and silencing the prophets of calamity, had been decisive as well as brilliant; the expenses of the war were far less
