Congress was not, however, willing to invest the President with the contingent power to make offensive war. The recommendation of the President in the case had, nevertheless, considerable influence in determining the minds of the Senators in regard to the question of recognizing the independence of Texas. On March 1st, 1837, the Senate adopted Mr. Walker's resolution. On the previous day the House of Representatives had voted to insert in the civil and diplomatic appropriation bill an item for the expenses of a diplomatic agent to Texas, whenever the President should receive satisfactory evidence that Texas was an independent Power and should consider it expedient to appoint such a minister. President Jackson had invited this expression of the {300} views of Congress in his message of the previous December, in which he expressed the view that Congress ought to determine the expediency of recognizing the independence of Texas, and, although the resolutions of the two Houses of February 28th and March 1st, 1837, did not formally assume to recognize that independence, the President evidently attributed to them some virtue, since he soon opened diplomatic intercourse with the Texan agent at Washington. The resolutions of the two Houses of Congress and this act of the President, taken together, were regarded by the people of the United States and by foreign Powers as a recognition of Texan independence. [Sidenote: The question of annexation.] It was clear to all thinking minds that the next step after independence would be annexation to the United States. There is little question that Texas was big enough and strong enough to stand alone against Mexico, certainly with the aid which she was sure to receive from without and with the growth which she was destined to enjoy; but there was no natural boundary between the United States and Texas, and the inhabitants of Texas were chiefly Anglo-Americans. The natural boundary of the United States on the southwest is the desert between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, and the territorial extension of the United States to that limit was simply the fulfilment of the moral order of the world, which tends to make the lines of states correspond with the lines of physical geography and of ethnical differences. Except for the connection of the question of slavery extension with that of territorial extension after 1836, the question of the annexation of Texas would have been generally viewed in this natural and national light. That connection, however, made the North generally assume the attitude {301} of opposition to annexation, while it greatly excited the desires of the South in favor of it. [Sidenote: Webster on annexation.]