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WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1859
Please accept by best thanks for your attention and communication, and believe, very respectfully, &c., Jno. J. Smith. To Judge J. C. Watrous." The fact is thus revealed that Judge Watrous had been counsel in this case before going on the bench, but that in assuming the judicial office, he had turned over the business he had been man- aging to Hale and Johnson, the attorneys he had imported into Texas to aid in the accomplishment of his purposes. The writer of this letter, one of the persons who had employed the judge in this case, congratulates him on his promotion to the bench, and says: "I am also satisfied that if our case should come before you, that we shall have both law and justice rendered us, so far as it is dependent on your decisions." Thus writes the client to his lawyer who had been made judge, and who is congratulated on the justice with which he will decide the case in which he had been counsel. · It may well be imagined what influences this conspiracy must have possessed itself of, and wielded for evil, when it is seen how a memoralist who dared to ask for the impeachment of Judge Watrous has been hunted, traduced, and threatened, to deter him from the prosecution of his remedy before Congress. Leading presses have been subsidized to devote their columns to his abuse, and to the circulation of absurd slanders. Great influences must certainly have been employed to procure this wholesale and unqualified personal abuse, when we reflect upon the indorsements Mr. Mussina has received with respect to the truth and justice of his complaints. The assertion of his wrongs has been sustained by the unanimous report of one committee of Congress, the :findings of this committee have again been indorsed by a moiety of the present House Judiciary Committee, and those of this committee who dissented have been willing to admit that they had not examined the charges assigned by Mussina with care. With such indorsements of his verity, and the fact being considered, too, that the judge he accuses had been previously charged by the sovereign State itself, what in- fluences may we not imagine to have been employed to so pervert the truth? In the history I have stated of the conspiracies, collusions, and frauds, iri which Judge Watrous was an active party, I have not attempted to comprehend all the malfeasances of the judge.
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