WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1849
87
northern states without adopting any measures effectually to put down Garrison, Tappan, and their associates, will present an issue which must be met by the South, or it will be vain for us ever after to attempt any thing further than for the state to provide for he1· own safety by defensive measures of her own. If the issue presented is to be met, it can only be done by a con- vention of the aggrieved states-the proceedings of which, to be of any value, must embody and make known the sentiments of the whole south, and contain the distinct anunciation of our fixed and unalterable determination to obtain the redress of our griev- ances, be the consequences what they may." "We must have it clearly understood that, in framing a consti- tutional union with out Northern brethren, the slave-holding states consider themselves as no more liable to any more interference with their domestic concerns than if they had remained entirely independent of the other states; and that as such interference would, among independent nations be a just cause of war, as among members of such a confederacy as ours, it must place the several states in the relation towards each other of open enemies. To sum up in a few words the whole argument on this subject, we would say that the Abolitionists can only be put clown by legislation in the states in which they exist, and that this can only be b1·ought about by the embodied opinion of the whole south, acting upon public opinion at the north which can only be effected through the instrumentality of a convention of the slaveholding states. Fo1· this we believe the public mind is not yet prepared, especially, in our sister states." While these passages and the parallel ones in the late address of Mr. Calhoun, unmask his long cherished and ill-concealed designs against the Union, I feel some pride in the conviction that it unmasks also his motive for the denunciation aimed at me.-If the advocacy of a measure which removed one cause of contention, tending to produce an ill-feeling, if not a rupture, between the members of the confederacy-if opposition to all the schemes of mad fanaticism at the north, and mad ambition at the south, which would embroil the country in civil war, provoke assaults upon me, there is no man living who ,vill give them a heartier welcome. It is some evidence that I stand in the way of the rash assailants and the deep plotters who would,
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