During the pendency of the treaty, there was an attempt by John Tyler, aided by his Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, to commit the United States to the military support of Texas. It was nothing but an attempt. There was no belligerent intervention or act of war, but only what Benton calls an “assumpsit” by Calhoun. On this “assumpsit” the veteran Senator, in the memoirs of his Thirty Years in the Senate, breaks forth in these indignant terms:-- “As to secretly lending the Army and Navy of the United States to Texas to fight Mexico while we were at peace with her, it would be a crime against God and man and our own Constitution, for which heads might be brought to the block, if Presidents and their Secretaries, like Constitutional Kings and Ministers, should be held capitally responsible for capital crimes.”[89] The indignant statesman, after exposing the unconstitutional charlatanry of the attempt, proceeds:-- “And that no circumstance of contradiction or folly should be wanting to crown this plot of crime and imbecility, it so happened, that, on the same day that our new Secretary here was giving his written assumpsit to lend the Army and Navy to fight Mexico while we were at peace with her, the agent Murphy was communicating to the Texan Government, in Texas, _the refusal of Mr. Tyler, through Mr. Nelson, to do so, because of its unconstitutionality_.”[90] Mr. Nelson, Secretary of State _ad interim_, wrote Mr. Murphy, our Minister in Texas, under date of March 11, 1844, that “the employment of the Army or Navy against a foreign power with which the United States are at peace is not within the competency of the President.”[91] Again Benton says:-- “The engagement to fight Mexico for Texas, while we were at peace with Mexico, was to make war with Mexico!--_a piece of business which belonged to the Congress_, and which should have been referred to them, and which, on the contrary, was concealed from them, though in session and present.”[92] In the face of this indignant judgment, already the undying voice of history, the “assumpsit” of John C. Calhoun will not be accepted as a proper example for a Republican President. But there is not a word of that powerful utterance by which this act is forever blasted that is not strictly applicable to the “assumpsit” in the case of Dominica. If an engagement to fight Mexico for Texas, while we were at peace with Mexico, was nothing less than war with Mexico, so the present engagement to fight Hayti for Dominica, while we are at peace with Hayti, is nothing less than war with Hayti. Nor is it any the less “a crime against God and man and our own Constitution” in the case of Hayti than in the case of Mexico. But the present case is stronger than that which aroused the fervid energies of Benton. The “assumpsit” here has been followed by belligerent intervention and acts of war.