WRITINGS OF 5Al'II HOUSTON, 1849
84
and the sub-treasury. Whether he remains truer to the latter than the former is a matter depending on circumstances not yet developed. With these evidences of Mr. Calhoun's peculiarly steady ad- herence to the cause of the South, I now come to the topic on which he has choosen to pronounce against me, as a renegade, and shall examine whether his consistency with the slave issue which he has now broached authorize him to assume the character of censor. After the ordinance of 1787 had settled the question as to the introduction of slavery into territories where it did not exist, the Missouri question opened a new controversy on the subject. Could the extension of slavery be restricted by Congress in any portion of a territory in which it has been authorized by law? This momentous question was submitted by Mr. Monroe to his cabinet, and the opinion of each member required in writing, when the issues and all its threatening, consequences hung upon their de- cision. A contemporaneous letter from Mr. Monroe to General Jackson, and the diary of Mr. Adams of that day, recording the transaction, prove that Mr. Calhoun concurred with the rest of the cabinet in approving the act of Congress imposing the restriction. Mr. Calhoun's written opinion has disappeared fro1n the files of the department; but the separate and written at- testations left by Mr. Monroe and Mr. Adams established the fact that it once existed. A more recent act of Mr. Calhoun throws on him again, as a member of Mr. Tyler's administration, a still more invidious responsibility, as giving new force to the principle assumed to sustained the power of Congress in restrict- ing slavery even in States where the institution existed. By his surreptitious dispatch of the annexation, containing this restric- tion upon Texas, Mr. Calhoun destroyed the legal capacity there existing to employ slave labor north of 36° 30' and cut off a vast region from the occupation, of Southern planters and farmers. In this case there was no threatened schism of the Union, as in that of the Missouri compromise, to make it a sort of necessity. Mr. Calhoun had an alternative proposition in his hand, which it is known the President elect (Mr. Polk) had agreed to adopt, because in giving a commission to adjust the term of annexation, it was at once more just to the interests and more flattering to
Powered by FlippingBook