346
WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1859
serve them. I have been with Texas in six troubles and in seven I will not desert her. It was the honest yoemenry of the country, men inured to toil, men from the plow, the planting in- terest of the country who sustain and support it, not the kid gloved politicians, who called me forth. Their letters came to me from all portions of the state, urging me to once more face calumny and abuse for their sake. Their cramped signatures told that their hands were hard; but their honest words were those of freemen who would not submit to dictation. At their call I have quit my flocks and herds, and am ready again to throw all my energies into the scale of the common weal. Until a common sympathy with my fellow citizens would no longer let me refuse, I was opposed to allowing my name to go before the people as a candidate. Having done so, I intend to allow their intelligence _to be their guide, shall do no canvassing, and make no speeches, unless it be on an occasion like this, when business or accident brings me in their vicinity. Notwithstanding my desire to retire, and that this candidacy has not been of my own seeking, but in a spontaneous wish of my fellow citizens, the organs of the Houston Convention party have opened upon me their batteries of vituperation. It is the people, not me, whom they should assail ; but as they assail the people through me I am ready to repel it. Most prominent among these is the organ at Austin. What reason it can have for assail- ing me I cannot see, unless it knows the spoils depend upon my being beaten. If the statements of Gov. Pease and other respect- able gentlemen be true, it can afford to use its types to maintain its party ascendency, for it has obtained thousands of dollars in defiance of law from the public treasury. Its editor 2 is not to blame for making his types help to preserve the system by which he gets fed at the public crib, nor am I to blame for using my tongue to repel his slanders, so long as I do not say anything unkind of him. But the Houston Convention was a party organization? It was-but of what kind of a party? It was a Convention, but as Conventions_are an offshoot from democracy, we have a right to enquire whether they are good scions of the parent stock. I don't know how good Know Nothings who composed a majority of that Convention regarded it; but I know it was anything but a democratic Convention. They made a platform which declares resistance to slavery agitation, and they then agitated it in its worst form by discussing the reopening of the African Slave
Powered by FlippingBook