[Sidenote: The party treason of Tyler and the Whig war upon the President's veto power.] The Whigs regarded Mr. Tyler as a traitor to the party and began a war upon the veto power of the President. They had come back again to their original principle of government--the supremacy of the legislature over the executive. From this account, it is clearly manifest that the Whig party did not stand upon any fundamental principle which would enable it to meet successfully those questions which, after the final settlement given to the bank and tariff issues by the vetoes of President Tyler, came to the front--the questions of territorial extension and of slavery extension. [Sidenote: The Whigs unable to encounter the questions of territorial extension and slavery extension.] It might be thought, at first view, that the Democratic party of that day was no better prepared than the Whig party to encounter these questions, since it, too, had reached its distinctive position through its attitude in economic issues. But the strength of the Democratic party lay in the South, and the South had a strong interest in territorial extension for the purpose of slavery extension, which, so long as the Southern wing of the Democratic party ruled the party, would furnish a clear and definite aim to the policy of the party, and would, thereby, give it great advantage over the Whigs, whose Northern and Southern contingents were much more evenly balanced, and, therefore, as to these questions, less able, or, rather, entirely unable, to gain a position upon which they might make a common stand. In a word, as to the Whig party, there was, after 1842, nothing to take the place of their overthrown economic policies, while, as to the Democratic party, there was territorial extension for the sake of slavery extension. When {288} these latter questions came to the front, therefore, they were destined, sooner or later, to disrupt the Whig party and destroy it altogether. The whole South would be for territorial extension, chiefly for the sake of slavery extension, and a large party at the North would be for territorial extension _per se_. The opposition to territorial extension must, therefore, become sectional, and as that opposition came chiefly from the Whig party it was the Whig party which would be degraded from its national character by this question, and then destroyed by it and its attendant question of slavery extension. {289} CHAPTER XIII. TEXAS