Mr.
President and Gentlemen of the Convention, I have been honored
with a commission by the Convention of the State of South
Carolina to repair to your State and lay before your Convention
an ordinance of the State of South Carolina, by which she seceded
from the confederacy and dissolved all connection with the
federal government of the United States. And also to tender to
you the sincere sympathy of the people of South Carolina in the
great and momentous movement in which we are all engaged, and in
which our interests are identical and our honor is alike
involved. I am also instructed respectfully to suggest to you, in
the event of your secession to cooperate with us and other
seceding Southern States in the formation of a confederacy in
which the constitution of the United States is to be taken as a
basis, and that you send delegates to a convention to be held at
Montgomery in the State of Alabama, on the 4th day of this month
to establish a government for such seceding States.
Having
thus been honored by your body with an opportunity of discharging
the special objects of my mission, I shall not presume to
trespass upon your patience with any suggestions of mine as to
your duty to your State. Indeed, had I no scruples upon the
propriety of doing so, I should certainly decline it being too
well satisfied that the honor and interests of Texas are much
more secure in your own hands. But I trust I may not be intrusive
if I refer for a moment to the circumstances which prompted South
Carolina in the act of her own immediate secession, in which some
have charged a want of courtesy and respect for her Southern
sister States. She had not been disturbed by discord or conflict
in the recent canvass for president or vice-president of the
United States. She had waited for the result in the calm
apprehension that the Black Republican party would succeed. She
had, within a year,
invited her sister Southern States to a conference with her on
our mutual impending danger. Her legislature was called in extra
session to cast her vote for president and vice-president,
through electors, of the United States and before they adjourned
the telegraphic wires conveyed the intelligence that Lincoln was
elected by a sectional vote, whose platform was that of the Black
Republican party and whose policy was to be the abolition of
slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves
to equality with ourselves and our children, and coupled with all
this was the act that, from our friends in our sister Southern
States, we were urged in the most earnest terms to secede at
once, and prepared as we were, with not a dissenting voice in the
State, South Carolina struck the blow and we are now satisfied
that none have struck too soon, for when we are now threatened
with the sword and the bayonet by a Democratic administration for
the exercise of this high and inalienable right, what might we
meet under the dominion of such a party and such a president as
Lincoln and his minions.
It is from under such dominion
that South Carolina respectfully invites you to unite in forming
a Government with a homogeneous people, identical in interest
with you, and whose effort it will be to perpetuate the
institutions of our fathers.
We
are not unmindful of your illustrious history when fresh from the
fields of victory and glory in which you established your own
independence you presented a spectacle unexampled in the history
of the world. With a territory sufficiently extensive for
empires, with a soil rich in the production of everything
necessary for the happiness of man, and with a climate as lovely
as can be found on any spot of the habitable globe, without money
and without price, you united your destiny with a sisterhood,
whose duty it was to foster and and protect you, and yet from our
common enemy you received in return but neglect and insult, and
even arson and poison, that your hearthstones might be violated
and your wives and little ones tortured and murdered.
In
conclusion I will simply add that it is a source of highest
gratification to me, from what I have witnessed since I have been
with you, and the intelligence and spirit in your honorable body,
to be able to report on my return to South Carolina, and on the
wayside, through six now independent, sovereign, Southern States,
that your own noble State of Texas, in her own way, and at her
own time will very soon be added to their number, and ready to
unite with them in a Southern Confederacy, to perpetuate the
institutions of our ancestry, who transmitted them to us, that we
should have in them but an usufruct, and transmit them,
untarnished, to our posterity.
Allow
me again Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Convention, to tender
you my sincere thanks and gratitude for the honor you have
bestowed upon me, and the kindness you have extended to me both
publicly and privately since I have had the pleasure of
associating with you and to assure you that they will most kindly
be remembered by me and I am sure appreciated by the State I
represent.
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