Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/640

 and the South has the assurance of their fraternal feelings. The fanatical outrage was rebuked and the offenders punished. Is it for this that the Southern States are called Upon to dissolve the fraternal ties of the Union, and to abandon all the benefits they enjoy under its aegis, and to enter upon expedients in violation of the Constitution and of all the safeguards of liberty under which we have existed as a nation nearly a century? In the history of nations, no people ever enjoyed so much national character and glory, or individual happiness, as do today the people of the United States. All this is owing to our free Constitution. It is alone by the union of all the States, acting harmoniously together in their spheres under the Constitution, that our present enviable position has been achieved. Without a Union these results never would have been consummated, and the States would have been subject to continual distraction and petty wars. Whenever we cease to venerate the Constitution, as the only means of securing free government, no hope remains for the advocates of regulated liberty.

Were the Southern States to yield to the suggestion of South Carolina, and, passing over the intermediate stages of trouble, a Southern Confederacy should be established, could South Carolina offer any guarantee for its duration? If she were to secede from the present Union, could one be formed with a Constitution of more obligatory force than the one that has been formed by our fathers, in which the patriots and sages of South Carolina bore a conspicuous part? Sever the present Union—tear into fragments the Constitution—stay the progress of free institutions which both have sustained, and what atonement is to be offered to liberty for the act? From whence is to come the element of a "more perfect Union" than the one formed by the men of the Revolution? Where is the patriotism, the equality, the republicanism, to frame a better Constitution? That which South Carolina became a party to in 1788, has to this period proved equal to all the demands made upon it by the wants of a great people, and the expansive energies of a progressive age.

Neither in peace nor in war has it been found inadequate to any emergency. It has in return extended the protection which union alone can give. The States have received the benefits of this Union. Is it left to them to abandon it at their pleasure—to desert the Union which has cherished them, and without which they would have been exposed to all the misfortunes incident to their weak condition?

The Union was intended to be a perpetuity. In accepting the conditions imposed prior to becoming a part of the confederacy, the State became a part of a nation. What they conceded comprises the powers of the Federal Government; but over that which they did not concede their sovereignty is as perfect as is that of the Union in its appropriate sphere. They gave all that was necessary to secure strength and permanence to the Union—they retained all that was necessary to secure the welfare of the State.

Texas can not be in doubt as to this question. In entering the Union, it is not difficult to determine what was surrendered by an independent Republic. We surrendered the very power, the want of which originated the Federal Union—the right to regulate commerce with foreign nations. As an evidence of it we transferred our custom-houses, as we did our forts and arsenals, along with the power to declare war. We surrendered our national flag. In becoming a State of the Union, Texas agreed "not to enter into any treaty, alliance.