policy from the apparently more careful and calculating Whigs. It would be easy here, as has been the case in so many general histories, to overestimate the value of the Demo-cratic slogan "Fifty- four-Forty or Fight!" in the campaign of 1844. But the intensity of feeling after the election of Polk and especially after his Inaugural Address and first Annual Message seems to have been reflected back upon the situation before November of 1844. Certainly there was no intention on the part of those who framed the Baltimore platform to make Oregon anything more than the tail of the Texas kite. "Re-occupation of Oregon" would balance "Reannexation of Texas," and so remove the appearance of too-great sectionalism. This had been noticed somie months earlier by the Texan minister to the United States who wrote his government:[1]
"The West are intent on the occupation of Oregon, in order to wrest it from the grasping power of Great Britain—it is believed that the interest of the two questions of the annexation of Texas and the occupation of Oregon can be combined, securing for the latter the south and southeastern votes and for the former some of the northern and entire western vote. Those presses which have discussed the matter have placed it above party grounds and unshackled with party tramels. This I think is highly advantageous for if it were made a strictly party vote, neither of the two great parties have sufficient members to carry it."
The Democratic leaders had gauged the power of the western demand for Oregon and the political possibilities therein with greater insight than the Whigs. The "Oregon fever" which raged in almost every part of the Union, as Niles thought, and which had started the real migrations of 1842 and 1843, had been the incentive of that intense fervor which manifested itself all up and down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Public meetings were held and resolutions were framed, some for the benefit of Congress and some for public consumption alone.
- ↑ Van Zandt to Anson Jones (Secretary of State for Texas), 16 Oct., 1843; Garrison, Texan Diplomatic Correspondence, II, 222. It is hardly necessary to state that Mr. Van Zandt's views of the partisan aspect were not upheld by the facts.
