Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/621

 Let those who choose, add to my watchword, "the enforcement of the laws." If they maintain the Constitution and the Union, the enforcement of the laws must follow.

But, fellow-citizens, we have a new party in our midst. They have deserted the old Democracy, and, under the lead of Mr. Yancey, have started what they call a Southern constitutional party. They say that they could not get their constitutional rights in the national Democracy; and because the platform was adopted which they all indorsed and under which they all fought in 1856; they seceded. It will be recollected that I objected to that platform in 1856; but I was declared to be wrong. They all denounced me then; but now they suddenly see that the platform won't do, and they secede to get their constitutional rights. They are the keepers of the Constitution; they don't want anything but the Constitution, and they won't have anything but the Constitution. They have studied it so profoundly that they claim to know better what it means than the men who made it. They have nominated Southern constitutional candidates, and have men traveling about the country expounding the Constitution; and yet there is scarcely one of them but will tell you that, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Lincoln may be elected in the mode pointed out by the Constitution and by a constitutional majority, they will not submit. You hear it from the stump, you read it in their papers and in their resolutions, that if Mr. Lincoln is elected the Union is to be dissolved. Here is a constitutional party that intends to violate the Constitution because a man is constitutionally elected President. Here is a constitutional party that proclaims it treasonable for a man to uphold the Constitution. If the people constitutionally elect a President, is the minority to resist him? Do they intend to carry that principle into their new Southern Confederacy? If they do, we can readily conceive how long it will last. They deem it patriotism now to overturn the Government. Let them succeed, and in that class of patriots they will be able to outrival Mexico.

But who are the teachers of this new-fangled Southern constitutional Democracy? Are they not men like Yancey and Wigfall, who have been always regarded as beyond the pale of national Democracy? Transplants from the South Carolina nursery of disunion. Whenever and wherever the spirit of nullification and disunion has shown itself, they and their coadjutors have been found zealously at work. They have been defeated time and again; but like men who have a purpose, they have not ceased their efforts. No sacrifice of pride or dignity has been deemed too great if it assisted in the great purpose of disunion. What if they assailed the Compromise of 1850. They indorsed it in the platform of 1852. From nonintervention they turn to intervention! From the peculiar advocates of State Rights, denying the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, they become the advocates of the Supreme Court as an arbiter, and shout for the Dred Scott decision. Anything for disunion! They can as readily dissolve the Union upon one issue as another. At the Nashville Convention they determined to dissolve it unless the Missouri Compromise line was extended to the Pacific. In 1854 they deemed the existence of this line a cause of separation, and demanded its repeal. The admission of Kansas was the next ultimatum, and now it is the election of Mr. Lincoln. Should they