The Papers of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, Volume II

130

TEXAS STATE LIBRARY

among whom were colonels, generals, legislators, a, governor, a vice- president &c. all declared themselves against Texas, that is, in favor of centralism, although in the free co-qntry in which they lived, nothing compelled them to this exposition of their sentiments. The following fact will further prove both the enthusiasm of the l\Iexicans in the war a,gainst T,exas, and their facility in deluding themselves, when their reason is made subservient to their wishes. I have already mentioned that Mr. John Q. Adams made a speech in the House of Representatives on the 31st of May, 1836, against the recognition of the independence of Texas. This gentleman, beheld, as I stated. in my Correo of the 11th of July, in the cap- tivity or death of Santa Anna, a source of revolution in Mexico, and from this revolution a war between the United States and that Republic; a war of races; a war between Anglo-Saxon Americans,. and l\Iorisco-Spanish-Mexican Americans; a war which on the part of the United States would be neither more nor less than aggression, conquest, and the .re-establishment of slavery in a country where· it had been abolished; a war in which the Mexicans would pursue the Texians to the very centre of the United States; in which the Creeks, the Seminoles, the Negroes &c. would make common cause with them; a war, in which an intrepid Mexican invader might proclaim the abolition of slavery on the very soil of the Union, and would swear vengeance against the enemies of the Indians, whose alliance with l\Iexico he already foresaw; and lastly, combining the ideas of the recognition of the independence of Texas, with its incorpora- tion in the United States, and with the conquest of Coahuila, Tamau- lipas, Santa Fe &c. he saw Great Britain and France leaping in the arena &c. I opposed these chimeras with obvious observations in the Correo above quoted, and with the sensible report presented to the Senate by l\Ir. Clay, chairman of the committee on foreign affairs. All men of ordinary intellect would have pronounced l\Ir. Adams' discourse to be the raving insanity; but the Mexicans hailed him as their guardian angel, and decreed him a statue. Under such circumstances, and whatever superiority in valor we may ascribe to the Texians, no reasonable being would have imagined that seven millions of l\Iexicans, united under a despotic govern- ment, would have failed to annihilate the handful of colonists that dared to oppose them. By what miracle were, then, the movements of an entire nation paralysed, and this formidable mass dissolved and melted away? Not c~rtainly from the want of pecuniary re- sources, since, however insignificant a nation may be, by the union at once of the principles and interests of its population, all such obstacles can be ready overcome, nor would Mexico have been wanting in any kind of war-like equipment, had not its government been deprived of the moral strength indispensable in efficiency directing the will of the people to a common object. This was effected by the efforts of philanthropic writers, who being horrified at the sight of a fanatic nation determined to disgrace and outrage the human species by intolerable abuses of power, changed the opinions and· sentiments of a large proportion of the Mexican republicans, dis-

Powered by