(2206) [HALL to PUBLIC]
Address to the People
Fellow Freemen,
The despot dictator, and his vassel myrmidonns, are fast displaying their hostile colums on the frontier of our heretofore happy and blessed Texas. Their war cry is, "death and destruction to every Anglo-American, west of the Sabine;" their watch word, actually, "beauty and booty." Many of you met the veteran soldiers of Europe, when they dared to invade the land of our fathers, under the same sacrilegious watch word - you chartered and gloriously drove them back to the ocean; you made tyrants tremble at the name of American freemen, and taught them that the soil of an independent people is not to be polluted by the footsteps of a mercenary soldier. And will you now, as Texian freemen, as fathers, as husbands, as sons, and as brothers, suffer the colored hirelings of a cruel and faithless despot, to feast and revel, in your dearly purchased and cherished homes? Figure to yourselves, my country- men, the horror a_!ldmisery that will be entailed on you should the ruffians once obtain foothold on our soil? Your beloved wives, your mothers, you daughters, sisters, and helpless innocent children given up to the dire pollution, and massacre of a hand of barbarians!! Your farms redeemed by you from the wilderness, with soi much pain and labor, laid waste! and where now flourish the rich products of the husbandman, will be seen the briar and bramble, and our garden of Texas again become a dreary wild, occupied only by the savage of the desert, and the cruel animals of the forest; and the nameof Texas will only be remembered by its fearful sufferings, and as having been once inhabited by a civilized, but unfortunate people. As a fellow freeman, I earnestly entreat you, at once to prepare for the field and "let us on" to the scene of action. There is not a moment to lose; I shall be ready to take my place in the ranks of the defenders of "home and firesides" on the 10th of next month, and anxiously invite all who possibly can, to meet me in the town of Washington on that day, prepared for a decive and glorious campaign. United Texas has nothing to fear and everything to hope. Let our motto be "Victory and Independence, or an honorable grave," and our watch word "the tyrant dead or alive, or a visit to his palace." [February, 1836?) John W Hall
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