The Life of Abraham Lincoln, from His Birth to His Inauguration as PresidentLamon, Ward Hill
History
The Life of Abraham Lincoln, from His Birth to His Inauguration as President
Lamon, Ward Hill
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865
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 President has said which
would either admit or deny the declaration. In this strange omission
chiefly consists the deception of the President's evidence,--an omission
which, it does seem to me, could scarcely 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 position pressed upon him by the prosecution,
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,
are the President's struggles in this case.
Some time after my colleague (Mr. Richardson) introduced the
resolutions I have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and
interrogatories, 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 it), but on revolution. Any people anywhere,
being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake
off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.
This is a most valuable, a most sacred right,--a right which, we hope
and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to
cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to
exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize, and
make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than
this, a _majority_ of any portion of such people may revolutionize,
putting down a _minority_, intermingled with or near about them, who
may oppose their movements. Such minority was precisely the case of the
Tories of our own Revolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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