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WRITINGS OF SAM: HOUSTON, 1824-1857
who would be the most suitable person. He said he wfshed to express himself as if he were not present, and he would say that he (Pat) was the most suitable man to be in the office, and Houston remarked that he could thus speak of himself. To express himself as if he were not present, he (Houston) was the most suitable man to be put in the President's chair; he derided Anson Jones, and said all his productions had died of appoplexy, and he feared he (Jones) would die of it himself; that he had only deigned to publish a few words against his attack upon him, and that nothing more was heard of it; he asserted that there was an Austin clique, and that they desired to get a law enacted whereby they could get all the money out of the treasury by hypothecating their wild lands to the State; he attributed no motives to the Democratic Party of Texas in the present canvass, but plunder. If the Treasury were taken away the party would be destroyed; he was down on Governor Pease as being in his way, and he said there were several sheepies for the U. S. Senate; he said that if his place should be filled by the Democrats, people would look at the vacated seat in the United States Senate and would wonder and enquire where was the Texas Senator? They would point to the new encumbent; the people would be in- credulous; they would not believe it; they would say that Texas surely had sent a much better looking man, and that the encum- bent was some member of the other House who had strayed into Sam Houston's seat; he said that Pierce, with his sixty millions of revenue and his thirty thousand office-holders, had used all his patronage in running him down, and that the Federal offices in this State had been bestowed upon men for that purpose; he said very 0 little about the Nebraska-Kansas act; he considered himself instructed to vote.against that act by the vote of Texas in accept- ing the terms of annexation, and in nominating him for the Presidency after his voting for the Oregon bill, and that the people had to blame themselves for his vote, and not him. He prophesied that Missouri would be a free state, and that in five years from now there would not be a slave within its borders; he spoke then of coming events as indicating the progressive termination of slavery in the South; he enumerated the many free states about to come into the Union·, and declared that they would soon overshadow the slave states, and that the latter would be put an insignificant portion of the confederacy. He dis- cussed no principles to divert this calamity, but avowed that he was the only democrat having any principles; he alluded to
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