utterances which produced criticisms among his political friends at home, and cost him several severe contests for the retention of his seat-those of 1847 and 1851 will be remembered. Before the people, however, the formidable disaffection in party ranks notwithstanding, he was invincible. His first effort in Congress was a speech in favor of the bill refunding the fine imposed on General Jackson by Judge Hall in 1815. He spoke also on the measure for the annexation of Texas; and during its course, in a number of speeches, defended the justness of the war with Mexico. His speech on tariff revision, which resulted in the law of 1846, exhibited thorough research and knowledge of that intricate subject. The erection of special industries into monopolies by a protective tariff system, he held to be partial and unjust, and grossly injurious to the interests of the most numerous classes of the people, and moreover, in contravention of the cardinal principles of free government. In regard to the Oregon boundary-line, and the threatened difficulty with the British Government, he sustained the policy of President Polk. He was a strenuous advocate of retrenchment in the expenses of the Government, which he perceived to be unnecessarily and inordinately large in many features, chiefly so in extraordinary and useless offices and large salaries. He favored simple and economical administration, in the interest of the toiling tax-payers, and as a potent instrumentality in repressing the inevitable tendency to corruption. A speech on this subject, of great earnestness, was construed as an attack on the then Democratic Administration, and gave umbrage in some quarters. But it was not his way to withhold the expression of his views under dread of any disapprobation. In a debate arising upon an important question then prominent, he delivered an incisive speech in advocacy of the Executive veto power, in which he traced a contrast between its wholesome use as a feature of republican government, and the kingly negative under

a monarchical system. He defended it as a conservative clause of the Constitution, designed to restrain hasty, improvident, and sectional legislation, proper. to be wielded by the Chief Magistrate as the representative of the whole people. Perhaps the most glowing dream of his ambition did not forecast the era twenty years later, when he should boldly exercise it in circumstances perilous with the crisis of his public career. About this period he initiated his long and persistent struggle to secure the enactment of a law granting a homestead of one hundred and sixty acres of the public lands to any citizen who should occupy and cultivate a part of it for a specified number of years. This measure encountered both discouragement and opposition from various sources. The great and overshadowing question of slavery and its complication with territorial settlement, was an obstructing prejudice to its intrinsic merits. Upon this rich and vast domain which it was proposed to reserve for this purpose, the eager eyes of incorporated greed, was vulture-like, were already gloating. The homestead law was designed as a bounty to enterprise and frugal industry and the encouragement of thrifty citizenship, the richest treasure a nation may have; but a powerful influence strove to retain it for ripening schemes of selfish speculation adroitly masked. But Andrew Johnson conspicuously championed the measure, and at a time and under circumstances when considerations of sectional popularity would have deterred a less intrepid and independent man.

may be said to have been its projector, and his name is indissolubly identified with this legislation, so beneficent to thousands, and so sagacious and statesman-like. It is one of that class of laws which crown their authors with the blessings of generations of people. The many homes on the teeming acres of the great West stands as a monument to the wisdom and courage of Mr. Johnson. In the agitation ensuing upon the territorial acquisitions from Mexico with reference to slavery, as a Southern man, Mr. Johnson

steadily upheld the rights and interests of his section as guaranteed under the Constitution. In the exciting debates to which this portentous question led, he did not assume extreme ground touching the institution of slavery, nor advocate its extension as a means of maintaining the balance of political power between the Free and Slave States. He did, however, defend its Constitutional sanctions where it then existed, and in the common territory of the United States, as a species of property as inviolable as any other. As to the policy and perpetuity of this peculiar institution, he held that the former was settled in the fact that it existed, and was thoroughly incorporated in the body of society, and that the latter was a question out of the province of the powers of the General Government, and determinable only by a variety of economical considerations, as time might develop. An aggressive war upon it as a moral and social wrong, which was to be hedged by inhibiting its spread, he despised as fanatical, and violative of the spirit in which the Federal Union was formed, and deprecated it as threatening to incite a sentiment imperiling alike the Union and the Constitution, the safeguard of all institutions."

He warmly supported Polk's Administration, and mainly took the Southern views of the questions involved. Still it is by no means apparent that he was ever deeply in love with slavery, or that his support of its interests was not with him a political necessity. While he advocated the annexation of Texas, he did it on grounds somewhat peculiar, as may be seen in the following extract from his speech on the subject in the House :

"Admit, for the sake of the argument, the fact that the title set up by Texas, to herself, is not clear beyond

dispute; admit, also, the fact of her passing voluntarily under the jurisdiction of the United States, thereby putting this Government in possession of the whole country. Once in possession, this Government is not merely bound. to rely on the possessory title, but is cast back upon her more ancient right, acquired by treaty from France in 1803, which is beyond dispute, and good against the world, and places this Government in a position that will enable her to do justice to a brave and patriotic people, by incorporating them into the Union, and thereby redeem its plighted faith. The title to the whole country was legally and Constitutionally acquired from France in 1803. In 1819 it had been surrendered, or ceded, to Spain, contrary to the consent of the inhabitants, in disregard of national law, and by trampling under foot treaty stipulations, solemnly made and entered into.

"If the premises be correctly laid, and the conclusions be lawfully drawn, the whole question resolves itself into a plain, simple proposition of admitting a new State into the Union, a power which no one doubts or denies; and all that remains for Congress now to do, is to prescribe the mode and manner of admission. I think the great error the committee has fallen into in the discussion of this subject, is the confounding of two separate and distinct things; the one, to acquire territory under the treatymaking power; the other, the admission of new States into the Union. It has been contended by some, since this discussion commenced, that the Government must first acquire the territory by treaty, and then, I suppose, keep it in a kind of political probation for a certain length of time, and then admit the territory so acquired into the Union as a sovereign State. The acquisition of territory under the treaty-making power is wholly incidental. There is nowhere to be found in the Constitution the power expressly conferred on the General Government to acquire territory. If the admission of new States into the

Union be made dependent upon the exercise of an incidental power, flowing from the treaty-making power to acquire territory, the express grant of power becomes the inferior and subordinate to the incidental power, which is an absurdity in itself. The admission of a sovereign State into the Union is not an acquisition of territory in the sense that territory is or can be acquired under the treaty-making power. They are wholly different. When territory is acquired by this Government, under the treatymaking power, the entire jurisdiction and right inure to this Government; or, in other words, the territory so acquired becomes the property and creature of the States composing the Union at the time of such acquisition. Not so when a State is admitted into the Union. She then comes in as an integral, clothed with all the attributes of the other sovereignties, retaining the entire control and disposition of her own territory. The admission of Georgia and North Carolina into the Union, after the adoption of the Federal Constitution by the other States, did not vest the right of territory in the Federal Government. For long after their admission into the Union as States they made deeds of cession of their territory to the General Government.

"The profitable employment it would give to slavelabor, thereby enabling the master to clothe and feed that portion of our population, softening and alleviating their condition; and in the end, when it shall please Him who works out all great events by general laws, prove to be the gateway out of which the sable sons of Africa are to pass from bondage to freedom; where they can become merged in a population congenial with themselves, who know and feel no distinction in consequence of the various hues of skin or crosses of blood."

Here was a new doctrine as to the advantages of annexation, one which never could have struck a