In 1840, General Harrison, the Whig candidate, was elected to the Presidency, but died within a few weeks after his inauguration in 1841, and was succeeded by John Tyler. The latter favored the Slave Power; and on April 12th, 1844, John C. Calhoun, his Secretary of State, concluded with Texas a treaty of annexation--which was, however, rejected by the Senate. Meanwhile the public mind was greatly agitated over the annexation and other, questions. [In the London Index, a journal established there by Jefferson Davis's agents to support the cause of the rebellious States, a communication appeared during the early part of the war, Dec. 4, 1861, supposed to have been written by Mr. Mason, of Virginia, in which he said: "To tell the Norths, the Butes, the Wedderburns of the present day, that previous to the year 1839 the sovereign States of the South had unalterably resolved on the specific ground of the violation of the Federal Constitution by the tariff of spoliation which the New England States had imposed upon them--to secede from the Union; to tell them that in that year the leader of the South, Calhoun, urged an English gentleman, to whom he had fully explained the position of the South, and the intolerable tyranny which the North inflicted upon it, to be the bearer of credentials from the chief persons of the South, in order to invite the attention of the British Government to the coming event; that on his death-bed (Washington, March 31, 1850), he called around him his political friends--one of whom is now in England--warned them that in no event could the Union survive the Presidential election of 1860, though it might possibly break up before that urged them to be prepared; leaving with his dying words the sacred cause of Southern secession a solemn legacy in their hands--to have told this to the Norths and Dartmouths of the present day, with more and even stronger evidence of the coming events of November, 1860, would have been like speaking to the stones of the street. In November, 1860, they were thoroughly ignorant of all the momentous antecedents of secession--of their nature, their character, their bearing, import, and consequences." In the same correspondence the distinguished Rebel emissary substantially let out the fact that Calhoun was indirectly, through himself (Mason), in secret communication with the British Government as far back as 1841, with a view to securing its powerful aid in his aforesaid unalterable resolve to Secede from the Union; and then Mr. Mason pleads--but pleads in vain--for the armed intervention of England at this later day. Said he: