155
WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1860
the formation of the Government. Because we carry the ques- tion of niggerism into national politics, and it engenders bad feeling, it is no reason for believing that our rights are invaded. We still have the institution of slavery. All the legislation on the subject for the past twenty years has been to secure it to us, so long as we may want it. It is our own, and the North has nothing to do with it. The North does not want it, and we have nothing to do with that. Their customs are their own. They are guar- anteed to them just as ours are to us. We have the right to abolish slavery-they have the right to establish it. It is our interest to have it. Climate, soil, a13sociation-all make the institution peculiarly suited to us. If it were to their interest, the people of the North would have it. Even in Massachusetts, as I told them a few years since in Boston, they would have it yet, but for the fact that it wou.ld not pay. Now, when the "cotton States" are "precipitated into a revolution," and the Southern Confederacy is formed, is the idea of State Rights to be maintained, or is there to be a centralized government, forbidding the States to change their institutions, and giving peculiar privi- leges to classes? I warn the people to look well to the future. Among the unsatisfied and corrupt politicians of the day, are many who long for title and power. There are wealthy knaves who are tired of our simple republican manners; and they have pliant tools to work upon in the forum and with the pen. So long as the Union lasts, the masses need not fear them-when it falls, aristocracy will rear its head. Whenever an encroachment is made upon our constitutional rights, I am ready to peril my life to resist it; but let us first use constitutional means. Let us resist, as our fathers did, with right on our side. They exhausted all legal means of remedy first. When submission to tyranny or revolution was all that was left them, they tried revolution. It was the same in Texas. The people fought to uphold the Constitution of 1824. When it was again violated, they sent petitions to the Central Government. Their agent was imprisoned, and an army was sent to disarm them. Then they raised the standard of revolution. In the share I have borne in these things I claim nothing more than the right to love my country in proportion as I have done my duty to it; but I may ask, what higher claim have these men, who would inaugurate revolutions before their time? My weak condition warns me against giving vent to feelings which will come up when I behold the efforts of whipsters and
Powered by FlippingBook