WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1860
129
To P. T. RrcHARDSON 1
Executive Department, Austin, September 3, 1860.
Mr. P. T. Richardson Dear Sir, I thank you for the confidence you manifest in me, and I trust that I am not wholly unworthy of it. You ask, "Would it be good policy for all the Governors of the Southern States to so respond to the subject of making such appropriations as will secure for them all the late improvements in fire arms, and in such quantities as will be adequate to their defence, with all necessary ammunition &c., provided we should be driven to the necessity of a Southern Confederacy?" Such policy, to my mind, would be worse than suicidal, to the interests of the South, and moreover, it would be a direct tend- ency to aggravate sectional feeling. The great evils of which we complain are mostly of our own making, and the very excite- ment that we so deprecate, and which is so rapidly depreciating the value of our slave property, destroying at the same time that mutual confidence which has hitherto sustained Texas securities, has been brought about by the acts and furors of crazy politicians, to promote the division sentiment of Southern Ultra Secession Democracy. And the policy that you suggest, were it not to countenance this dangerous doctrine, would place the Southern States in an attitude hostile to the Government and fratracidal in its design and character. There can be no aggravation of evil which would point to the dismemberment of the Union as its only panacea. Such a con- tingency may never arise. For every wrong of which the South complains, there is to be found in the Magna, Charta of our rights a constitutional remedy. The Federal ait·m and the Federal Judiciary have never been appealed to in vain. They have been found equal to every demand made upon them, and for every imaginary evil which finds a "local habitation and a name no where but in the distempered dreams of Southern enthusiasts who are called upon to fire the Southern heart instead of the Southern mind, and by one concerted action at the proper time to precipitate the Southern States into a revolution" and this too, by the men who have never raised an arm to give stability and perpetuity to the Government which they would tear into pieces and to the Union which their fathers cemented with their hearts' best blood.
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