Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/224

 held over him in the Southern Express a year or more before the present article, the writer thinking to frighten him from his earnest appeals against disunion. The Congressional record of this speech states: "Amusement and applause followed the humor and eloquence of Senator Houston. It showed that his relations to Mr. Calhoun had been honorable from his youth." In closing he declared his fidelity to the South; and in so doing, drew a parallel between disunionists per se and Benedict Arnold. He declared: "Disunionists per se sink below Benedict Arnold in the scale of infamy." He added: "Sir, when assailed hereafter because I am faithful to the Union, let it be understood that without union we are without a country; for, without union we can have no country and no home."

Houston's earnestness drew a reply from Mr. Butler, of South Carolina. He fully accorded integrity to General Houston; but declared that Mr. Calhoun, now deceased, had no hand in the threat of the Southern press, a year before, to which allusion had been made. General Houston responded with equal cordiality: "I can assure the gentleman that I cast no reflection on Mr. Calhoun. As to the Senator himself, he has only acted in his uniform demeanor of unceasing and becoming courtesy, politeness, and good feeling."

Houston's career during this eventful session, closed with a manly support of a proposed grant of lands to settlers in Oregon. This he urged among other reasons, because North Carolina had, in his orphan days, made a similar grant of lands in Tennessee, then constituting a part of her territory. From first to last during the debates that formed the crisis of the Senate, when its former leaders were withdrawn, and discussions more complicated than any ever before engaged in, grew heated, Houston was the Nestor whose counsel turned the scale of decision. The five measures that constituted the compromise acts then debated, were: first, the fixing of the boundary between Texas and New Mexico; second, the admission of California, with slavery prohibited; third, the establishment of a territorial government for Utah; fourth, the fugitive slave law; fifth, the suppression of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The three great leaders of the past, Webster, the champion of national unity; Calhoun, the advocate of State rights; and Clay, the mediator in compromise, one after another passed from the Senate. On the 31st March, 1850, Calhoun, after weeks of detention by prostration, breathed his last; and his two comrades for over thirty years, spoke in sincere affection of his memory, and of their expectation that very soon they should join him in a better and purer assembly. Mr. Webster, who had lost