I am now through the whole of the President's evidence; and it is a
singular fact that if any one should declare the President sent the army
into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people who had never submitted,
by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the United
States, and that there and thereby the first blood of the war was shed,
there is not one word in all the which would either admit or deny the
declaration. This strange omission it does seem to me could not have
occurred but by design. My way of living leads me to be about the courts
of justice; and there I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for
his client's neck in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work
round, befog, and cover up with many words some point arising in the case
which he dared not admit and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to
make it appear so, but with all the allowance I can make for such bias,
it still does appear to me that just such, and from just such necessity,
is the President's struggle in this case.

Sometime after my colleague [Mr. Richardson] introduced the resolutions I
have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and interrogations,
intended to draw the President out, if possible, on this hitherto
untrodden ground. To show their relevancy, I propose to state my
understanding of the true rule for ascertaining the boundary between
Texas and Mexico. It is that wherever Texas was exercising jurisdiction
was hers; and wherever Mexico was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and
that whatever separated the actual exercise of jurisdiction of the one
from that of the other was the true boundary between them. If, as is
probably true, Texas was exercising jurisdiction along the western bank
of the Nueces, and Mexico was exercising it along the eastern bank of the
Rio Grande, then neither river was the boundary: but the uninhabited
country between the two was. The extent of our territory in that region
depended not on any treaty-fixed boundary (for no treaty had attempted