447
WRITINGS OF S,\i.\•I HOUSTON, 184,5
accumulating materials for defamation, I would have been very silly, for your character is known. Many of your grave and important materials you have been in possession of for years, you say, and had a full knowledge of my character previous to your support of me for the Presidency. Honest soul! Where was your conscience and patriotism, then? Now, all your complaints can be resolved into this, that your disappointments and private griefs have caused this wonderful gust of patriotic indignation. You complain of my abuse of you for the last several years, This is not true, nor do I care who the retailers of slander were. I do not think you ever heard what you allege against me! It is true when I heard of your frequent abuse of me, that I did not commend you extravagantly, but by way of an appropriate re- quital I said, and am still prepared to say, in behalf of you, that you are one of the most intelligent, amusing, and agreeable scoundrels that I have anywhere known. As to the object of your address to me, I cannot arrive at any conclusion. It may be that you wish to extort hush-money from me. If so, you had better rely [torn] Demons!! This may be a new expedient with you; if so, base as it is, it would be as little censurable as many acts of your protracted existence. If by your course you expect, in charging your falsehoods against me with all the display of "certified" calumnies, you expect to alarm me or bring me to terms with you, you are mistaken. I defy you and your slanders! When you send them to the world, an that I desire is that you should endorse them with your proper name. Then your readers will have the "burn and antidote" both before them ! You are capable of giving as much adornment to a work of this kind as any one, and if you succeed in transferring the load of infamy which your untold crimes have entailed upon your con- science, (if any you have) to any character now upon earth, you will crush it into ruin. You have afforded me the only written evidence of your cour- age and chivalry in your audacious address to me. It is strange. that a man should become a hero at your time of life when he had worn a colonel's commission in the northern army during the war of 1812, and returned with a bloodless sword and epaulettes unsullied by the enemies "ode powder," a hero, too, always distinguished in wordy wars. Colonel, I will not call on you for these reasons. If I am as great a rascal as you represent me, and you are as clever a gentleman as you assume to be, you would be inexcusable in descending to my level. And if I were
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