remarked: “Clay has been so successful in his compromising other disputes, I wish he could fall upon some plan of compromising this, and then all parties (or enough of all parties) might unite and make him President.” It was just at that time, while listening to the extreme sentiments of Calhoun, that Clay expressed his first doubts as to the wisdom of his tariff compromise of 1833. But, as was usually the case with him, he did not reason out the why and wherefore to the end; he never learned that no compromise about slavery could last; and so he was indeed, as Madison hoped he would be, ready to compromise again whenever an occasion came.
After having given his vote against a measure which slavery demanded for its security, he had to play a part in the progress of another scheme which the slave power pushed forward for the same object, — the scheme having in view the eventual annexation of Texas.
Clay's “record” as to Texas was very curious. In 1820, as a member of the House of Representatives, he fiercely attacked the Monroe administration for having given up Texas in the Florida treaty, taking the ground that Texas was included in the Louisiana purchase, and therefore belonged to the United States. In March, 1827, when he was Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, he instructed Poinsett, the envoy of this Republic to Mexico, to propose to the Mexican government the purchase of Texas for a sum of money; and, judging from the entries in Adams's Diary, the scheme
