jammed and crammed before five o'clock.” Stephens then describes how he himself had to scheme and struggle to get in through a side door; how Clay appeared about seven o'clock, and could hardly force his way in; how the vast meeting would cheer him again and again at the top of their voices; how they would not let anybody speak before him; how “whole acres” of people had to go away without getting in at all; and how Shepperd of North Carolina, being “more Whiggish than Clayish,” remarked, “rather snappishly,” that “Clay could get more men to run after him to hear him speak, and fewer to vote for him, than any man in America.”
In the mean time grave events were preparing themselves in Congress. In his annual message of December, 1844, President Tyler stoutly asserted that, through the late presidential election, “a controlling majority of the people and a large majority of the states” had declared in favor of the immediate annexation of Texas, and that both branches of Congress had thus been instructed by their respective constituents to that effect. William Cullen Bryant and his friends, who had made themselves believe that they could vote for Polk and at the same time against the annexation of Texas, might have taken this audacious statement as a personal affront. But the Whigs could hardly repel the doctrine of special instructions to Congress by presidential election, since they had pretended that the election of 1840 was a special in-
