Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/623

 and the North has nothing to do with it. The North does not want it, and we have nothing to do with that. Their customs are their own. They are guaranteed to them just as ours are to us. We have the right to abolish slavery—they have the right to establish it. It is our interest to have it. Climate, soil, association—all make the institution peculiarly suited to us. If it were to their interest, the people of the North would have it. Even in Massachusetts, as I told them a few years since in Boston, they would have it yet, but for the fact that it would not pay. Now, when the "cotton States " are "precipitated into a revolution," and the Southern Confederacy is formed, is the idea of State Rights to be maintained, or is there to be a centralized government, forbidding the States to change their institutions, and giving peculiar privileges to classes? I warn the people to look well to the future. Among the unsatisfied and corrupt politicians of the day, there are many who long for title and power. There are wealthy knaves who are tired of our simple republican manners; and they have pliant tools to work upon in the forum and with the pen. So long as the Union lasts, the masses need not fear them—when it falls, aristocracy will rear its head.

Whenever an encroachment is made upon our constitutional rights, I am ready to peril my life to resist it; but let us first use constitutional means. Let us resist, as our fathers did, with right on our side. They exhausted all legal means of remedy first. When submission to tyranny or revolution was all that was left them, they tried revolution. It was the same in Texas. The people fought to uphold the Constitution of 1824. When it was again violated, they sent petitions to the Central Government. Their agent was imprisoned, and an army was sent to disarm them. Then they raised the standard of revolution. In the share I have borne in these things I claim nothing more than the right to love my country in proportion as I have done my duty to it; but I may ask, what higher claim have these men, who would inaugurate revolutions before their time?

My weak condition warns me against giving vent to feelings which will come up when I behold the efforts of whipsters and demagogues to mislead the people. Here in Texas they convert the misfortunes of the people into political capital. Property has been burned in some instances, and here and there a case of insubordination has been found among the negroes. Occasionally a scoundrel has attempted to run a negro off to sell him; and all these things are charged to abolitionism. Terrible stories are put afloat of arms discovered, your capitol in flames, kegs of powder found under houses, thousands of negroes engaged in insurrectionary plots, wells poisoned, and hundreds of bottles of strychnine found. Town after town has been reported in ashes, and by the time the report has been found to be false, some new story to keep up the public excitement has been invented. The people of the South have been filled with horror by these accounts, and instead of Texas being looked upon as the most inviting spot on earth, they turn from it as from a land accursed. Who will buy land here, so long as these things continue? What Southern planter will emigrate with his slaves to such a country? If there was a cause for it, we could bear it without a murmur; but there has been no cause for the present state of feeling. We all know how every occurrence has been magnified by the disunion press and leaders and scattered abroad, and for no other purpose