WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1850
228
be erroneous, but my informants were men of respectable char- acter, and I took it for granted that what they said was correct, not expecting to make use of it at the time. Since the subject has come up, I must advert to the statement of the gentleman, made at the time this subject was incidentally alluded to by me, and he called on me for explanations in regard to it-in Feb- ruary last, I think it was. The honorable gentleman then stated that if it w~s alleged that there was any interference in the State of Mississippi by persons not residing in that State, it was a most erroneous one. He said the whole movement depended upon the people there; that a few leading men, known in all portions of the State, met and had a consultation, and then recommended to the people the meetings that were sub- sequently held to send delegates to the convention; that delegates were accordingly sent, being gentlemen of the highest respecta- bility, and that all this was done, not by the politicians or political leaders of Mississippi, but by the people alone, the said politicians, influenced by high considerations of patriotism, all the while holding the people back. Now, I should like to know if a number of prominent men-half a dozen, or a dozen say, of leading poli- ticians in the State-get together and consult and recommend the holding of primary meetings to the people of the State, which meetings are subsequently held, if that should be termed restraining the people from action? Does that look as if the people were ahead of the politicians, or does it not rather look as if the politicians were ahead of the people? And I would ask also, if an agreement among leading and intelligent gentle- men to ride through the State and get up public meetings does not look much more like giving tone to popular sentiment than it does to restraining it? [Davis interrupted.] Well, then it appears that a few individuals gave the impulse to all this excitement in . Mississippi, and the other States also. If such be the fact, I believe it will be confined to those individuals, and will not pervade the mass of the people; and hence it was that I guaranteed the fidelity to the Union. And I repeat, if their constitutional rights are fairly carried out, and there be no infraction of them, you will find the people of the South ever loyal to the institutions of the country. I am con- tending that had not the people been excited in the manner and ~ by the means to which I have once before referred, they would never have talked of, much less taken up as a solemn question for debate, the i~ea of estimating or calculating the value of the
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