Polk's election by the Democrats in 1844 had turned mainly upon the question of annexing Texas.

The acquisition of territory by Mr. Polk's Administration added to the United States California and New Mexico and portions of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, a territory containing in all 1,193,061 square miles, or over 763,000,000 acres, and constituting a country more than half as large as all that held by the Republic before he became President.

If our country had not already attained that rank by the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, the further additions made by Mr. Polk's Administration advanced it at once to a continental power of assured strength and boundless promise.

For my own opinions on this subject I might refer to President Polk's carefully considered message of the 15th December, 1847, addressed to the House of Representatives whilst I was a member of his Cabinet.

They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's Trinity Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms.