This design coming to naught, through the
failure of Mr. Van Buren to reach a second term, he made a wild rush
for the prize by again thrusting forward the Texas question. Colonel
Benton, who was the predetermined heir of Van Buren, has detailed the
manner in which this was done in a very curious chapter of his "Thirty
Years." The plot was successful, so far as plunging the country into a
needless war was concerned; but it was Polk and Taylor, not Calhoun,
who obtained the Presidency through it. Mr. Calhoun's struggles for a
nomination in 1844 were truly pitiable, but they were not known to the
public, who saw him, at a certain stage of the campaign, affecting to
decline a nomination which there was not the slightest danger of his
receiving.
We regret that we have not space to show how much the agitation of the
slavery question, from 1835 to 1850, was the work of this one man. The
labors of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Wendell Phillips might have borne no
fruit during their lifetime, if Calhoun had not made it his business
to supply them with material. "I mean to _force_ the issue upon the
North," he once wrote; and he did force it.
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