Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/398

 to suspend all action, and leave the agitation unquieted without a remedy? If the commotion now existing in the land is not checked, it will go on. accumulating strength and force with every hour's delay, and give potency only to those who seek prosperity in their country's misfortune. Sir, the high-handed measures which have been carried on under the orders of the Administration, in the expectation that Texas, a younger sister, feeble, rising but recently from all the toils and trials of revolution, exhausted, emaciated, and surrounded with the difficulties that press upon her, is unable to resist the mighty arm of the Government, or that she will succumb to wrong and oppression, or that, if her voice of remonstrance should be heard at all, it would be heard with apathy and indifference by her sister States of the Union. If this has been the expectation, it is a vain illusion. Texas can not submit to wrong. If this nation has heretofore withheld her rights; if her claims have been deterred for years and she does not at this time command the favorable consideration of Congress, it is not her fault. She received the solemn pledge of this Government to fix her boundaries long before the acquisition of California; that acquisition has been consequent upon the annexation of Texas, and has grown out of it; and yet California comes forward, and now claims admission as a State.

I shall not now express my views in relation to the course which I think ought to be pursued; I am here to vindicate the rights of Texas, and to urge them upon the attention of the American Senate. Feeble as my advocacy of them may be, her rights are most eloquent, and her claims are prior to those of California, and are not to be postponed. No, sir, there is an urgent reason why her rights should be at once considered, and why her boundary should be at once settled. Is it not all-important that a sovereign State, claiming rights from this Government, under its solemn pledges, should have justice meted out to her at the earliest moment? Is it unreasonable that she urges her demand? Not at all. Years have rolled away since she received the pledge of this Government to determine her rights, and yet gentlemen say that the war with Mexico has nothing to do with the Texas boundary. I take the liberty of assuring the gentleman from New York [Mr. Seward] that it had much to do with that question. Mexico declared that if Texas was annexed to the United States it would be cause of war. The work was consummated, and war ensued. I ask, then, if war had nothing to do with our boundary? Has it not brought vast acquisitions to our territory, embracing our boundary, and deciding it according to our stipulated limits? You have made Texas a bridge to march over to foreign conquests, and are you now longer to postpone the adjustment of her rights? But how are these rights considered by the Executive of this nation? Is it thought fit to trample on Texas because she is young, or because she has not the thews and muscles and the sinews of older States to uphold her rights? Are her rights to be postponed or cloven down because, perchance, she might not agree with the Administration, and might not give to it the numerical support necessary to carry measures obnoxious to the nation?

Sir, the prejudices of the Executive against Texas, to which I referred the other day, are most strikingly made manifest in his message to the Senate relative to the recent proceedings at Santa Fé; yes, sir, and even in her misfortunes, and humiliation as supposed by some, she is taunted by the Executive, and we are told that she will submit to all this. I will say, without vaunting, that Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from whatever source it