This prudent act would have saved the executive from needless responsibility, whilst it indicated a sensitive devotion to the behests of our constitution. Congress met whilst our troops were encamped at Corpus Christi, as an army of observation, whose hostile, though protective character, was unquestionable; yet our representatives neither ordered its return nor refused it supplies. This denoted a willingness to sanction measures which might either pacify Mexico, or impose upon that republic the immediate alternative of war. It is not improbable that congress would have adopted such a course, because, according to the pretensions of Mexico, our troops had already invaded her domains. This is an important view of the question which should not be passed by silently. Mexico, it must be remembered, never relinquished her right to reconquer Texas, but always claimed the _whole_ province as her own, asserting a determination to regard its union with our confederacy as justifiable cause of war. The joint-resolution, alone, was therefore a belligerent act of the congress of the United States, sufficient, according to the doctrine of Mexico, to compel hostile retaliation. But, moreover, as the entire soil of Texas, from the Sabine to the Nueces or Rio Grande was still claimed by Mexico as her unsurrendered country, the landing of a single American soldier anywhere south of our ancient boundary with Spain, was quite as hostile an invasion of Mexican territory as the passage of our army from Corpus Christi to Point Isabel. Occasions upon which the eminent right of self protection has been adopted as a principle of action in the United States, are not wanting in our political history. The circumstances in all, are of course not precisely the same, but the policy is identical. The conduct of our government in regard to General Jackson's invasion of Florida for the suppression of Indian cruelties may be referred to. But congress might have found a still more analogous case, in the dispute between Spain and the United States as to the eastern limits of Louisiana. Spain alleged that Florida extended to the Mississippi, embracing what was then a wilderness, but, now, forms the populous States of Alabama and Mississippi; while our government asserted that all the territory eastward of the Mississippi and extending to the Rio Perdido belonged of right to us by virtue of the treaty concluded at Paris on the 30th of April, 1803. By acts of congress in 1803 and 1804 the president was authorized to take possession of the territory ceded by France, to establish a provisional government, to lay duties on goods imported into it; and, moreover, _whenever he deemed it expedient_, to erect the bay and river Mobile into a separate district, in which he might establish a port of entry and delivery.