WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1860
146
Were we to fail to pay our tributes to its worth, and to enlist in its defense, we would be unworthy longer to enjoy it. It has been my misfortune to peril my all for the Union so indissolubly connected is my life, my history, my hopes, my for- tunes with it, and when it falls, I would ask that with it might close my career, that I might not survive the destruction of the shrine that I had been taught to regard as holy and inviolate, since my boyhood. I have beheld it, the fairest fabric of Govern- ment God ever vouchsafed to man, more than a half century. May it never be my fate to stand sadly by gazing on its ruin! To be deprived of it after enjoying it so long would be a calamity, such as no people yet have endured. Upward of forty-seven years ago, I enlisted, a mere boy, to sustain the National flag and in defence of a harassed frontier, now the abode of a dense civilization. Then, disunion was never thought of, save a few discordant notes from the Hartford Con- vention. It was anathematized by every patriot in the land, and the concocters of the scheme were branded as traitors. The peril that I then underwent, in common with my fellow-soldiers, in behalf of the Union, would have been in vain unless the patriotism of the nation had arisen against these disturbers of the public peace. With what heart could these gallant men again volunteer in defence of the Union, unless the Union could withstand the shock of treason and overthrow the traitors? It did this; and when again in 1836, I volunteered to aid in transplanting Ameri- can liberty to this soil, it was with the belief that the Constitution and the Union were to be perpetual blessings to the human race, that the success of the experiment of our fathers was beyond dispute, and that whether under the banner of the Lone Star or that many starred banner of the Union, I could point to the land of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson, as the land blest beyond all other lands, where freedom would be eternal and the Union unbroken. It concerns me deeply, as it does every one here, that these bright anticipations should be realized, and that it should be continued not only as the proudest nationality the world has ever produced, but the freest and most perfect. I have seen it extend from the wilds of Tennessee, then a wilderness, across the Mississippi, achieve the annexation of Texas, scaling the Rocky Mountains in its onward march, sweeping the valleys of California, and laving its pioneer footsteps in the waves of the Pacific. I have seen this mighty progress, and it still remains free and independent. Power, wealth, expansion, victory, have
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