The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 18, July 1914 - April, 1915 Page: 48
438 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The Southwestern Historical Quarterly
summer of 1850. Houston refused to sign the address, and rid-
iculed the idea of a convention.
That the people of Texas paid so little attetnion to the slavery
controversy in 1850, although their senator was elsewhere severely
criticised for his action in it, was probably due in part to the fact
that all their interest was centered in the disposition of their
western boundary.
It was not until 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska bill came be-
fore Congress, that the Texans began to take any real interest in
the controversy that had agitated the other portions of the country
during the past half dozen years, or longer. The compromise of
1850 was merely a lull before the storm. The fugitive slave law
no sooner went into effect than the people of the North began
seeking ways and means of evading it; and the "personal liberty
laws" did not tend to allay the slavery agitation. The Texas press
began to show its interest in the controversy by reprinting edi-
torials on the subject from the leading Southern papers. When
comments were made, which was seldom, they were in accord with
Southern sentiment, but the papers appeared to hesitate to take
a firm stand on either side, as if conscious that the reading public
was divided on the issue.
In the great struggle in Congress over the Kansas-Nebraska
act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, and placed the
South on an equal legal footing with the North in a, vast territory
that had before been dedicated to freedom, Houston took an
active part against the measure. He opposed it vehemently and
unflinchingly. He spoke of the perils of such a measure and
especially of those that it would bring upon his state, which was
the southern terminus of the slave population. He called at-
tention to the fact that her favorable conditions for the production
of cotton, sugar, and tobacco would demand an enormous amount
of slave labor; that the disproportion of the slaves to the white
population would soon become enormous and the consequences
frightful; that the South's demand for non-intervention by Con-
gress would be as useless in theory as it would be dangerous in
practice; that if the measure were adopted, it would not secure
those territories to the South, nor preserve the Union of the states
nor allay the agitation in the North; that it would sustain neither
the Democratic nor the Whig party in its organization; and that
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 18, July 1914 - April, 1915, periodical, 1915; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101064/m1/54/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.