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WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1860
433
transferred our custom-houses, as we did our forts and arsenals, along with the power to declare war. We surrendered our national flag. In becoming a State of the Union, Texas agreed "not to enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, and not, without the consent of Congress, to keep troops or ships of war, enter into any agreement or compact with any other State or foreign power." All these rights belonged to Texas as a nation. She ceased to possess them as a State; nor did Texas, in terms or by implication, reserve the power or stipulate for the exercise of the right to secede from these obligations, without the consent of the other parties to the agreement acting through their com- mon agent, the Federal Government. The Constitution of the United States does not thus provide for its own destruction. An inherent revolutionary right, to be exercised when the great pur- poses of the Union have failed, remains; but nothing else. Might not South Carolina, if a new confederacy were formed, at any time allege that an infraction of the new Constitution, or some deviation from its principles had taken place? In such an event, according to the principles now laid down by her, she would then exercise the same power which she now assumes. Grant her assumption of the right of secession, and it must be adopted as a general principle. Massachusetts may then nullify the fugitive slave law by virtue of her right as a sovereign State, and when asked to obey the Constitution, which she would thus violate, quietly go out of the Union. It has been remarked by a statesman of South Carolina, when commenting upon the alleged aggressions of the North upon the South, that "many of the evils of which we complain were of our own making." If we have suffered from our own bad policy in the Union- from giving control of affairs to men who have not calculated well as to results (the Union has enabled us to retrieve many of these false steps), and at no time, since the history of our Govern- ment have so many of the safeguards of law been thrown around our peculiar institution-it is for us to sustain it and every other right we possess in the Union. Sustained by the Federal arm and the judiciary, we may rely upon the maintenance of these rights which we know we possess. Whenever these are taken from us, the Constitution has lost its power. There will be no Union to secede from, for in the death of the Constitution, the Union likewise perishes; and then comes civil war, and the strug- gle for the uppermost.
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