Mexicans could muster immediately between 5,000 and 6,000 armed men, counting citizens of the frontier villages.

With such reports pouring in to the seat of government, certain members of Congress began to demand that effective and sanguinary measures be instituted at once; others only proposed placing the country in a state of defense. A law hastily passed and approved December 26 authorized the raising of three spy companies to range the northern and western frontiers.[43]  In the House of Representatives a resolution was introduced advocating an invasion of Mexico, and was thought by those on the southern and western frontier to be the most popular measure of any that had occupied the attention of the present session of Congress.[44]  Such grandiose plans seemed rather ridiculous in view of the deplorable condition of Post San Antonio [Ed: elaborated earlier, pp. 383-384]. "The importance of maintaining that interesting post is too obvious to require discussion," Burnet chided Congress on December 22. "The fact that the Department of War is without the means of transporting the small supply of munitions at present required," he declared, "will assuredly convince an enlightened Congress of the necessity of a prompt action in this behalf." By the 24th it was reported that $4,000 had been spent or had been authorized to be spent for transporting ammunition to San Antonio and for obtaining horses to be used in scouting.[45]

Those who favored carrying the war into Mexico claimed that an army of eight thousand if subsisted by the Republic until it could cross the Río Grande, could easily "march to the walls of Mexico -- living on the enemy -- and make their own terms of peace, quietude, and conquest." Such an invasion, it was claimed, would "attract the attention of men of the first respectability in point of intellectual acquirements, wealth, political standing, and love of liberty in the Southern states, many of whom have heretofore lost their relatives and friends by the inhuman mode of warfare carried on by Mexico against Texas."[46]  The United States' diplomatic agent in Texas, George H.