THE FEDERAL RELATIONS which led out of the
difficulty,
offer to the senate. 39
The
OF OREGON
191
that of submitting a British
President, he said, had been in a at the the public of his offer of 49, he reception by quandry had quailed before the storm raised by five hundred Demo-
and he had underhandedly urged Senators, 40 including Benton himself, to speak in favor of Forty-nine. Benton saw all the Whig Senators and found that they intended to act in the best interests of the country, patriotically, in spite
cratic newspapers,
them by the Administration. As for himhe was although subjected to similar attacks, he pursued his course depending neither upon the President nor upon
of the attacks upon self,
the newspapers, but guided by his study of the question for Four years later, in 1850, he referred to twenty-five years.
on Oregon as not only having been opposed by Greenhow's book but by those who had made that " false and shallow" document the compendium of all knowledge "When I was actually extricating the United States from war by exposing the truth (about 49 as a line) I was blackguarded his course
41
organ, calling itself Democratic, by Greenhow." Besides the President, whose course will be considered in
in the
the next chapter, there may be another claimant of the honor. In 1847 a candidate for Parliament from Glasgow, McGregor, told
how
he had received a letter from Daniel Webster saying was an equitable compromise at the forty-
that unless there
ninth parallel as a basis there would be trouble between the two countries. 42 "Mr. McGregor agreeing entirely with Mr. Webster in the propriety of a mutual giving and taking to avoid a rupture, and more especially as the whole territory in dispute was not worth 20,000 pounds to either power, while the preparations alone for war would cost a great deal more before the countries could come into actual conflict, communicated the contents of Mr. Webster's letter to Lord John Russell, who 39 Thirty Years' View, II, 673 seq. 40 On the third of January, 1846, Preston King had the House clerk read a charge made in the London Times that Polk would rely upon the Whigs and a few Democrats to block the action of the House; Polk would thus appear popular in the West, by a daring declaration, while England and the South would prevent fatal consequences. Globe, XV, 131.
Nw
1 552-3. Pt. 2, 1662AA1, ft. XXI. London Examiner, 24 July,
41 YtHrf.. Ibid.,
gon
t .
372-3.
1847, quoted in Marshall, Acquisition of
Or~
