Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri dominates the front page with a sprawling, passionate Senate speech delivered May 28, 1846, on the Oregon Question—a geopolitical standoff over control of the Pacific Northwest. Benton traces the British claim to the Columbia River back to Alexander McKenzie's 1801 proposal to the British government, arguing that London only took the claim seriously after the 1818 joint occupation treaty. The speech pivots to grand imperial ambitions: Benton envisions American settlement of Oregon as the arrival of the 'Caucasian race' on Asia's doorstep, destined to 'civilize' the 'torpid' Chinese—language that reveals the deeply racist underpinnings of Manifest Destiny. He dismisses any real prospect of war with Britain, declaring the American "war party" extinct and the British fur traders too weakened to force conflict. Benton urges Congress to establish American law and government for settlers on the Columbia under President Polk's recommendations: a mounted regiment, blockhouses, a monthly mail, and extension of U.S. law to match British protections for their settlers.

This speech captures America in 1846 at the crescendo of westward expansion. The Oregon dispute threatened actual war with Britain—the "54-40 or Fight" slogan had energized the 1844 election—but Benton's confidence proved prescient: a treaty settling the boundary at the 49th parallel would be signed just weeks after this speech. More troubling is Benton's unapologetic racial hierarchy, which rationalized the displacement and extinction of Native peoples as divine law. His vision of American civilization 'civilizing' Asia prefigures the Open Door policy and American intervention in China. This moment marks the peak of American territorial ambition in North America and the ideological justification—racial superiority dressed as humanitarian progress—that would justify U.S. imperial expansion for generations.

• Benton invokes the 'venerable Mr. Macon' as a living witness to imperial expansion—"he remembered a line low down in North Carolina, fixed by a royal governor as a boundary between the whites and the Indians: where is that boundary now!" This is North Carolina congressman Nathaniel Macon, who served continuously from 1791 onward and was indeed witnessing the erasure he describes.
• The speech reveals brutal fur trade history: Benton notes the Hudson Bay and Northwest companies fought each other so savagely over beaver monopoly that Parliament was forced to merge them by charter in 1821, *specifically citing their mutual destruction as the reason for union*—a stunning admission buried in legislative archives.
• Benton threatens future action with remarkable specificity: 'The next war with Great Britain will leave them not a fort standing, from the Lake of the Woods to Hudson's Bay...from the mouth of Fraser's river to Bear lake'—a detailed map of every British trading post he intended to destroy.
• The speech tallies American grievances since 1812 in cold currency: 'five hundred men killed on the Missouri and the Columbia, the five hundred thousand dollars worth of property plundered there'—quantifying frontier violence as an accounting problem.
• Benton dismisses British abolitionists as delusional fanatics willing to pay any price for emancipation—'the slaughter of every man, the violation of every woman, the massacre of every child'—revealing the proslavery Democratic position even while celebrating white civilization.

• Benton had made the exact same prediction about the Rocky Mountains thirty years earlier (around 1816) and was laughed at then—'it was ridiculed then; it is becoming history to-day.' His career spanned the entire arc of American continental conquest, from fantasy to fait accompli.
• The speech references Edmund Burke's 1766 prediction that English colonists would 'top the Alleghanics, and descend into the valley of the Mississippi'—Burke, best known today as a conservative political philosopher, was derided as reckless for this forecast eighty years before Benton's speech. It became the blueprint for American expansion.
• Benton explicitly frames Chinese-American intermarriage as inevitable and desirable: 'The white and yellow races can marry together, as well as eat and trade together. Moral and intellectual superiority will do the rest'—pseudoscientific racism dressed as cosmopolitan optimism.
• The Hudson Bay Company fur traders, Benton predicts, will demand 'indemnity for losses, claim the navigation of the Columbia and require time to remove' after the war ends—essentially predicting their exact future behavior, which indeed happened; the company abandoned most Pacific posts by 1849.
• This speech was printed in the Indiana State Sentinel in Indianapolis in July 1846, weeks after Benton delivered it in May—showing how slowly news traveled even for major Senate debates, and how thoroughly western papers followed eastern politics in this era of expansion.