Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/206

 as to the tariff is "null and void, and no law, nor binding on this State, its officers, or its citizens"; and farther declaring that no "duties on imports "were to be "paid within the State after Feb. I, 1833"; adding, that any effort on the part of the Federal Government to enforce such collection would "justify the State in no longer regarding herself a member of the Union." The report of this action led President Jackson to give orders to the revenue officers which should prepare them for action should occasion arise. At the opening of Congress, Dec, 1832, he announced his purpose to issue a proclamation, declaring the resistance to a collection of the revenue at the ports of any State to be treason to the United States Government; which proclamation soon appeared. Through the efforts of Mr. Clay, a compromise measure modifying the tariff was carried through Congress, and the danger of armed hostility was avoided. It is due to history, and to an impartial estimate of the course of Sam Houston as Senator from Texas, to state these facts: Gen. Jackson in his Cabinet, as well as in private, declared as his belief that the movement for separation from the Union, debated by Mr. Webster and Hayne in 1830, with such ability in the Senate, precipitated in the calling and action of the Convention of November, 1832, was not a suggestion either of the statesmen or of the people of South Carolina; but that it was the project of interested political leaders, inflaming public sentiment for their own personal schemes of ambition. President Jackson believed and declared that the real end sought was that of Genet, in seeking in 1793 to form a Western French Republic, uniting Louisiana, along the Mississippi Valley, to Canada; an end again attributed to Aaron Burr, in seeking to form a Spanish and French empire, in which the Floridas, Louisiana, and Mexico, in 1806; and, though a Carolinian by birth, he went so far as to utter privately the prediction that, having failed of its end in 1832 on the issue of the tariff, the slavery issue would be resorted to by the same spirit of dissatisfied political ambition to secure a separate confederacy of the Gulf States. This prediction, known to Houston, was certainly, in him, a deep and the ruling conviction, while the duty which guided Jackson, in 1832, seemed to him duty in 1860.

The proposition for the annexation of Texas, privately and publicly discussed under the administration of President Tyler, had awakened throughout the country a controversy whose consideration belongs rather to the history of Texas than of Houston; the Washington who as "first in war " had already proved himself "first in peace " in the new and independent Republic. All the