Page:Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession.djvu/5

 assassins in these crimes—while the Govevnors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.

They have, through the mails and hired emmissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers amongst us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.

They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves, for the same purpose.

They have impoverished the slaveholding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.

They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slaveholding State.

And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slaveholding States, they have elected as President and Vice-President of the whole Confederacy, two men whose chief claims to such high positions, are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slaveholding States.

In view of these and many other facts, it is meet that our own views should be distinctly proclaimed.

We hold, as undeniable truths, that the governments of the various States, and of the Confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable:

That, in this free government, all white men are, and of right ought to be, entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorised and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both, and desolation upon the fifteen slaveholding States.

By the secession of six of the slaveholding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no