Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/421

 and at the time Oregon was organized by the Government, the South went against it, I may say, in a body. The Southwestern Senators and myself went for it, under the heaviest denunciations and anathemas that could be applied to any individuals. Was this an abandonment of it by the North? Had it been an abandonment of the application of it by the North, or its non-application by the South, to Texas? Did not the North receive five and a half degrees of slave territory from Texas, and in consideration of that cede to Texas the right of forming four States in addition to the one then formed? Call it a compact or compromise, as you please; but then it assumed the character of a compact when applied to Texas, because Texas came in recognizing that as a principle concurred in by the North and the South. They both applied it to Texas, and it was upon it that she came in. And so far, certainly, it was a compact with her. Is not Texas interested in that? Did she not consider the Missouri Compromise practically a compact, so far as she is concerned? Because she predicated her own upon it. And if you deprive her of the benefits resulting from and declared by that compact, when are her four States to come in, if the North has the ascendency? Can not they exclude them when they please if the Missouri Compromise be repealed? We hold them by an obligation which it would be dishonorable and infamous to abandon. You can not repeal that compromise without the consent of Texas. Remember, Texas was an independent nation, a sovereignty, when she came into this Union. She had rights equal to those possessed by this country; institutions quite as good, and a more harmonious structure of her community. Now, will there not be a liability that these four additional States may be denied to Texas? Texas insists upon this right in my person, as one of her representatives. I claim it as no boon bestowed. I ask it as no gift. The State demands it as a right, to form four additional States, if she should elect to do so.

But what would the repeal of this Compromise amount to? An abstraction? What would the South be benefited by it? By the amendment of the Senator from North Carolina, the bill is perfectly eviscerated, or, to use a senatorial term, because I think it may be applied with more propriety, elegantly emasculated. Yes, sir, it amounts to nothing. It holds a promise to the ear, but breaks it to the hope. If it is ever to be repealed, I want no empty promises. They have not been asked for by the South. They are not desired; and, so far as I am concerned, they will never be accepted. Neither my colleague nor myself have ever been consulted in relation to this subject. On the contrary, we have been sedulously excluded from all consultation. I have never had an intimation that a conference was to take place, a caucus to be held, or stringent measures applied in the passage of this bill. Nothing of the kind, I have been in the dark in relation to it. I feel that Texas has as important an interest as any other section of this Union in the repeal of the Compromise, and would be as vitally affected by it. She must be eventually, if calamities are to fall upon the South, the most unfortunate of all that portion of the Union.

I will give you my reasons why I think Texas would be in the most deplorable condition of all the Southern States. It is now the terminus of the slave population. It is a country of vast extent and fertile soil, favorable to the culture and growth of those productions which are most important to the necessities of the world—cotton, sugar, and tobacco. An immense slave population must eventually go there. The demand for labor is so great, everything is so inviting