Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/194

 through Canada down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and it was in view of the French attempt under Washington, and then under Jefferson, to sever first the West and then the Southwest from the English-speaking States of the North and East,—it was at such a center, and in memory of these attempts at disunion, that Lafayette uttered these memorable words, addressing the Mayor of St. Louis, August, 1825: "An union, sir, so essential, not only to the fate of each member of the confederacy, but also to the general fate of mankind, that the least breach of it would be hailed with barbarian joy, by an universal war-whoop of European aristocracy and despotism." No man in the country more appreciated these words than Houston. It was also during this visit, that, at Washington city, Lafayette predicted the gradual complete operation of natural laws tending to the emancipation of African slaves; as was recorded by G. W. Parke Custis, and published at the time in the "African Repository." From the rapid spread of emancipation measures advancing southward from New England, measures compelled by interest as well as principle, since a more productive class of labor was brought into competition with slave labor, Lafayette predicted that at an era not remote emancipation would gradually extend to the Gulf; that thus the old French settlements would be overstocked with the colored population brought in from the North; and, as a Frenchman anxious for his countrymen, he expressed the gravest apprehension for the future of the Gulf States. Trained as Sam Houston from childhood had been, sometimes side by side with negro and Indian laborers, as a hard-working yeoman, his whole heart from youth to old age centred on the interests of the agricultural yeomanry who tilled their own lands; and every one of his life-long appeals for union was inspired by the fact that the people at large wished to be left in peace to enjoy their homes, and not to be dragged against their will into what he to the last maintained were schemes of heartless politicians, only seeking personal ends of aggrandizement.

During this early history of the United States, and amid this early civil training of Houston and of his compatriots, the modern questions of Civil Service, in both the fields now discussed, were already debated. Attempts to civilize and educate the Indians in the Gulf States and in the Mississippi Valley, inaugurated under Mr. Monroe in 1819, and specially advanced by Mr. Calhoun as Secretary of War, before the organization of the Department of the Interior, were virtually a part of the Civil Service. In December, 1824, the Secretary reported 32 schools, with 916 pupils, in successful operation; a work only nominally connected with the War Department. Then, as now, the question was: Does the