WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1855
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widow whose husband rendered services to the country, which secured her Independence; for if the army had not been able to reach San Jacinto at the hour it did, Texas would have been lost! Do please write to me on matters & things. You will see a memorial of the poor Coosattie Indians. Lend them a helping hand, I pray you. May you prosper gloriously. Salute Friends Thine Truly Sam Houston. P. S. I intend to start about the 13th Inst. H. Hon Ashbel Smith 1 Ashbel Smith Papers, The University of Texas Library. 2 Captain Ross of the steamboat Yellowstone. See Houston to Captain John E. Ross, April 2, 1836, Volume I, 391-392. EXTRACT FROM AN ADDRESS AT NACOGDOCHES, OPPOSING A BILL FOR THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGNERS 1 December 21, 1855 This bill [the Kansas-Nebraska Act] relinquishes the acknowl- edged right of the South to slave states south of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes. It was a concession of every benefit the South might claim from the Compromise of 1820. It gives to aliens the right to suffrage in six months after they come to the Terri- tories, no matter where they came from-whether fresh from the prisons and poor houses of Europe, with the mark of the fetters or the prison garb upon their limbs,-they stand upon the soil as free as the American who has shed his blood in defense of his country; and with such privileges given such a class, the fallacious hope was indulged by Southern gentlemen that slavery would go into the Territories. The son of the soil, with his slaves and his sturdy boys, all capable of advancing and defending the interests of the Territories, are to be weighed in the balance with the pauper or the felon, who has been hurled from European society as a blot too foul for endurance; and by this means, slavery is to go into Kansas! The South repudiated this and stood by Mr. Clayton's amendment on the first vote upon the bill, but receded from its position when the bill came back from the House with the amendment stricken out, and swallowed the bill. I could not do it. The times have changed. Europe is emptying her vials of wrath upon us in the shape of thousands
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