inasmuch as all the electors who voted for Polk voted also for Dallas, and all who were for Clay also supported Frelinghuysen.

There were some very peculiar facts in connection with this election. The first was the magnitude of the electoral as compared with the popular majority. Polk had but 38,181 over Clay, and yet he received a majority of 65 in the votes of electors. Had the Abolitionists voted for Clay he would have had a popular majority of 24,119; he would have received the electoral votes of New York, 36, and Michigan, 5; and he would have been elected by 146 electoral votes against 129 for Mr. Polk. No doubt the Abolitionists acted with entire consistency in refusing to vote for Henry Clay, and no doubt it is as impossible to tell what might have happened if Clay had been elected, as it would be to guess what would have been the course of history if Van Buren had not written his Texas letter; but at all events the election of Clay would have postponed the annexation of Texas, and possibly it would have averted the Mexican war.

Another noteworthy incident of the election was what was known as the Plaquemines fraud. It will be noticed in the above table that the Polk majority in Louisiana is 699. The parish of Plaquemines, below New Orleans on the Mississippi, had voted in previous years, and was returned as voting in 1844, as follows:

The Democratic gain over the best previous year was 697, almost exactly the whole Democratic majority in the State. The vote was suspicious in this: that the Demo

cratic vote returned was greater in number than the entire white male population, of all ages, in the parish in 1840. The explanation that was given by the Whigs was that the steamboat "Agnes" went down from New Orleans with a load of passengers under the charge of a political magnate of Plaquemines, and that these passengers stopped at three different places and cast each time a unanimous vote for Polk and Dallas. The steamboat "Planter" took down one hundred and forty others, who also voted early and often for the same ticket. These assertions were not only made, but sworn to, by many witnesses, including some persons, one of them a minor, who voted several times each under the direction of the learned judge who managed the affair. The story bears all the marks of truth. If it is not true, it is at least singular that it was ten years after 1844 before Plaquemines parish could muster half as many Democratic votes as she gave that year to Polk.

Though the Whig newspapers rang with the charges of fraud, and though the accusation was supported by strong testimony, nothing was done about it. The election was lost, and a rectification of the fraud would not have changed the result. The Whigs quietly submitted, and when the electoral count took place in 1845, in the usual manner, no objection whatever was made, and Polk and Dallas were declared elected in due form.

XVII.

THE SECOND WHIG VICTORY.

THE administration of Mr. Polk was Democratic enough to please the most exacting of his partisans. Its leading events were the annexation of Texas in accordance with the joint resolution approved by Mr. Tyler three days before the close of his term; the Mexican war, which that act naturally and, indeed, inevitably, provoked; the settlement of the Oregon question, not on the line of 54° 40', which the Democrats had claimed as the true boundary, but on that of 49°; the re-establishment of the sub-treasury; and the tariff of 1846. On every one of these questions the Whigs were at issue with the dominant party. They knew that the annexation of Texas would lead to war, unless Mexico should feel too weak to resist the United States, and they opposed it on that account. They denounced Mr. Polk's instructions to General Taylor as calculated to goad Mexico to war, as indeed they did. They jeered at the President for having first transformed the claim of "the whole of Oregon" from a national into a party question, and then for having mildly accepted the proffered terms of Great Britain, which gave the United States only a part of what had been claimed. The subtreasury and the tariff questions were old ones, and the Whigs were united in their opposition to the Democratic

measures.

But meanwhile the question of slavery in the Territories was assuming large importance. The Abolitionists proper formed but a small body, but those who were hos

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tile to the extension of slavery were very numerous. vast majority of the Northern Whigs were against such extension, together with a very important body of Northern Democrats; but in neither party did the politicians have the courage to break with the pro-slavery section. Up to this time the Whigs had never mentioned the subject of slavery in their resolutions; and the opponents of extension, bravely as they might talk at home, did not venture to propose that it be made a party question. The Democrats had confined their declarations on the subject of slavery to an assertion of the right of States to regulate their domestic institutions.

It was partly due to accident that the question of slavery played so large a part as it did in the election of 1848. There had never been a time when there were not two factions of the New York Democrats. Silas Wright, at that time a senator from New York, was nominated for Vice-President on the ticket with Mr. Polk. As a friend of Mr. Van Buren, and as an opponent of annexation, he declined. But the reunion which took place after the convention brought him forward as a candidate for governor of New York the same year. He received a much larger majority than was given to Mr. Polk. The two factions fell apart again after the election; and when, in 1846, Mr. Wright was again a candidate for governor, he was defeated. His friends and followers believed that he was "slaughtered," and they ascribed his defeat not only to the secret opposition of the "Hunkers," so called because their opponents said they hunkered for office,- but to the machinations of the Administration. They gave as a reason for the hostility of Mr. Polk to him, an unreasonable jealousy, carefully fostered by the opponents of Mr. Wright, based upon the fact that the election of 1844 showed the governor to be more popular in New York than was the