Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/428

 peace and tranquillity; that as I found the country growing up rapidly, and have witnessed its immeasurable expansion and development, when I close my eyes on scenes around me, I would at least have the cherished consolation and hope that I left my children in a peaceful, happy, prosperous, and united community. I had hoped this. Fondly had I cherished the desire and the expectation from 1850 until after the introduction of this bill. My hopes are less sanguine now. My anxieties increase, but my expectation lessens. Sir, if this repeal takes place, I will ha e seen the commencement of the agitation; but the youngest child now born, I am apprehensive, will not live to witness its termination. Southern gentlemen may stand up and defend this measure. They may accept it from the Northern gentlemen who generously bestow it; but if it were beneficial to the South, it would have been asked for. It was not asked for—nor will it be accepted by the people. It furnishes those in the North, who are enemies of the South, with efficient weapons to contend with.

The Democracy in the North have stood firm to party ties. They have fought gallantly for our rights. If we pass this bill how can they maintain themselves? How can their representatives return to them and say: " We gave it"? Would not the reply be: " You gave it; then you are faithless servants, and we will put you down; you disgraced your party; you have given away a sacred thing, a pledge, a compromise thirty-four years old, which was venerated for its antiquity, and national benefits derived from it"? Depend upon it, they will be held to a strict account. They will have to answer for it. I call upon you to sustain those who stood by you of the South in opposition to those whose fanaticism, and prejudice, and misguided feeling would have wrested your rights from you. If you place them and their party in the predicament which I have mentioned, you will be doing them great injustice.

Mr. President, I have very little hope that any appeal which I can make for the Indians will do any good. The honorable Senator from Indiana [Mr. Pettit] says, in substance, that God Almighty has condemned them, and has made them an inferior race; that there is no use in doing anything for them. With great deference to that Senator, for whom I have never cherished any but kind feelings, I must be permitted to dissent from his opinions. He says they are not civilized, and they are not homogeneous, and can not be so, with the white race. They can not be civilized! No! Sir, it is idle to tell me that. We have Indians on our western borders whose civilization is not inferior to our own. It is within the recollection of gentlemen here that, more than twenty years ago, President Ross, one of them, held a correspondence upon the rights of the Indians to the Cherokee country, which they possessed east of the Mississippi, and maintained himself in the controversy with great credit and ability; and the triumph of Mr. Adams, if it was one, was much less than he had obtained over the diplomatist of Spain [Mr. Don Onis], in relation to the occupation of Florida by General Jackson. The Senator from Indiana says that, in ancient times, Moses received a command to go and drive the Canaanites and Moabites out of the land of Canaan, and that Joshua subsequently made the experiment of incorporating one tribe of the heathen with the Israelites, but it finally had to be killed off. Therefore, the Senator concludes, the Cherokees can not be civilized. There may have been something statesmanlike in the policy, but I do not discover the morality of it. I will say, however, that there is no analogy between the two cases. The people of Judea who were killed, or exterminated,