Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/182



allusion has been already made to Houston's election to Congress; it is proposed now to give a connected detail. Coleridge said, "To be truly great is to be great in little things." Genius now flashes, now flickers ; but greatness does its best, and triumphs every day. Washington was " first in peace and first in war" because his balanced mind saw what was best to be done, and his appreciative spirit selected the best man for each post. Houston had shown as a soldier brilliant daring in emergency, and at the same time the steady discipline essential to camp routine. If there is any place where these united qualities, French dash and English pluck, are called unitedly into requisition, it is in the U. S. House of Representatives. Houston was to be tested in this new sphere.

Elected in 1823 from the ninth, or last formed, district of Tennessee to a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives at the First Session of the Eighteenth Congress, three special circumstances were likely to test the capacity and character of a young man of mark. These were: first, the fresh energy of the people forming a new State; second, the vital interests, affecting all the States, whose issues were to be debated and settled at that era; third, the exceptionally able statesmen now associated to meet an emergency in the House of Representatives.

At an early period, under colonial administration, the rich lands west of the Alleghany range had tempted enterprising settlers; and the region now called East Tennessee was occupied prior to 1750. The attempt to push settlements farther westward was resisted by the Indians. Fort London, built in 1757, on the Little Tennessee, was captured in 1760, and its garrison were massacred; and for forty years few settlers went into Central Tennessee. When the Atlantic colonies declared themselves independent, though too far from the seat of war to be brought into action, the settlers armed to meet the emergency; and they declared their adhesion to the struggle for independence. When the war closed, the State of North Carolina, which claimed that her boundaries extended to the