WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1858
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had opposed its admission, and the extremists, North and South, seemed to want to keep the firebrand blazing. He next passed in review the causes of the quarrel between the North and the South, and contended that nothing had as yet transpired to justify a dissolution of the Union. The people of the North had so far confined themselves to voting, speaking, and publishing their views and sentiments upon the subject of African Slavery; the exercise of these privileges were inalienable and guaranteed by the Constitution, and however much sensible men might lament the course pursued by such fanatics in the North as Abby Kelly, Garrison, and Phillips, yet the evil was only augmented by the Abby Kellys, the Garrisons, and the Phillipses in the South, who foolishly joined in the quarrel and hurled epithet for epithet. That whenever the North should go so far as to lay the weight of a finger upon the rights of the South, the people of the South would unite as one man to repel the insult and protect their rights, and there would be required no Southern League, in the language of Mr. Yancey, "to pre- cipitate the Southern States into a revolution." He said that he was wearied of hearing the senseless cant about "Southern Rights," as though the South had any rights not enjoyed in com- mon with every section of the country. It had been the boast of our institutions, that they guaranteed equal rights to every citizen and state. Then, what had the South over the North, or the North over the South? Each sovereign State must be allowed to pass its own municipal laws and to regulate its own domestic institutions, and constitutionally to change them whenever it chooses. He denounced the project of reopening the African Slave Trade. Its authors were disunionists per se, and they sought to effect their object by widening the breach between the North and the South. He was equally severe upon the project of a Southern League, and said that its defenders and its objects were identical with those of the slave trade. • He ridiculed the remark recently made by Mr. Yancey, of Alabama, that the boys of this generation were wiser than the sages of the Revolution. Such sentiments, he regretted to say, were all too common. They furnished the best commentary upon the character of the times, and plainly indicated our tendency to anarchy and revolution; and as Mr. Yancey must have been an uncommonly bright youth, he wondered that he had not as a boy discovered the beauties of a Southern League. He said that his enemies had charged him with infidelity to the South! Though
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