34-8
WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1859
to concede to your demands with reference to the opening of the Slave Trade, it will be the signal for bitterness and strife. . We can't live in fellowship.. We must have a dissolution, and then follows civil war. You may take these men in their protean shapes, Nullificationists, Secessionists, African Slave Trade men, but they all mean disunion. I love my country-my whole coun- try. I would preserve it for posterity, as free and as pure as it came to us and therefore oppose everything calculated to destroy it. Two years ago you gave me a little the worst skinning that mortal man ever got. It was a regular drubbing. You beat me after the best style, as you had a right to do. I had voted against the Nebraska Bill and had voted against Mr. Buchanan. Well that is past. The Nebraska bill has had its day, and the results are to be seen. What they are I will not say, but I will say that Ex-Gov. Hammond, one of the most profound statesmen in the South, and one whom your legislature has fully endorsed, has declared "The Kansas Nebraska bill was a delusion and deception from the beginning." "It was a snare to those at the South. It was rotten with fraud, and those who made it, flinched from its consequence." Other members of Congress and states- men have declared that the South was deceived in the bill. I was the only extreme Southern Senator who voted against it, and for that you whipped me like a cur dog. If I was wrong, I own it and take it all back, and if you were wrong I forgive you. So we will start even again. It is past. This is no time for dragging out dead issues. We have crowding upon us enough in the present and we should meet them like men, who feel that the destiny of their country is in their hands and that history will hold them responsible. After you gave me such a drubbing, I went on to Washington. My position was a peculiar one. The people of Texas had rebuked me and if there was any spleen in my nature, men would say here was an occasion to call it forth. Many doubtless thought- "Well Houston, they have beat you, after all you have tried to do for Texas, and now is your time to retaliate." Those who deemed me capable of such meanness know not the yearnings I have had for the prosperity of Texas, and that even though she could cast me off, to her fortunes I would cling, upon her soil I would end my days. So long as her people were free and happy, it would be the proudest tribute which they could pay to the valor and patriotism of those who had struggled to estab- lish and maintain the institutions which they possess. I had
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