Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/220

 habitants of New Mexico, whose southern limit ran south of 36° 30', should prohibit the introduction of slavery, it should be no bar to the admission of the State into the Union. On the 30th January Houston supported a resolution giving a homestead to Hungarian exiles who fled to this country after the defeat of Kossuth. On the 8th February Houston spoke on the question of slavery in the Territories; alluding with much feeling to Mr. Calhoun, then detained from the Senate, and who died on the 31st March, a few weeks later; and he said it gave him pleasure to say he agreed with the eminent Senator from South Carolina on that question. Alluding, however, to Mr. Clemens of Alabama, who had spoken of the Union as already dissolved, he exclaimed:

"I deny the power of all the ultraists in the world to rend the Union in twain. If the contending parties would only approach these questions in the spirit of the precept laid down by the Divine Mediator, 'As ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them likewise,' it would be better for the country in all its sections, and for the people of all classes."

He had given his vote in 1847 for the admission of Oregon with slavery prohibited, and he had refused to sign the "Southern Address " in 1849. He referred to the movement of South Carolina in 1832 for nullification on the one hand, and to the agitation against slavery in 1835, when he was out of the country. This balanced position he had held and still maintained.

This allusion of Houston to the recent "Southern Address," which he would not sign, drew out Senators Davis and Foote of Mississippi, and Butler of South Carolina. After they had spoken, Houston rose and read the warning of Madison against disunion. This called forth another irrepressible outburst of applause from the galleries. When it had subsided, with the earnest tone and manner of a prophet of Israel, Houston looked upward, and exclaimed:

"I must say that I am sorry that I can not offer the prayers of the righteous, that my petition might be heard. But I beseech those whose piety will permit them reverentially to offer such petitions, that they will pray for this Union, and that they will ask of Him that buildeth up and pulleth down nations that He will in mercy preserve and unite us. I wish, if this Union must be dissolved, that its ruins may be the monument of my grave, and of the graves of my family. I wish no epitaph to be written that I survived the ruins of this glorious Union!"

Certainly no child, no friend of Houston who lived to see the events of 1860 to 1863, when, heart-broken, he died in an exile more complete and sad than any of his former life, can fail to believe that Houston's prophetic fervor was as sincere in its utterance as in historic fact it became true in his closing career.