On the eighteenth of February, General Twiggs, the United States commandant, surrendered to Houston all the national forces in Texas—twenty-five hundred men, and national property valued at $1,200,000. Five days afterwards, the vote on secession was taken. There were forty thousand for secession and fourteen thousand against it. These were anxious, eager days, and it was impossible to avoid catching the popular fever. The convention met again on the second of March, and on the fifth it at once adopted measures for entering the Southern Confederacy, to which new government all state officers were commanded to take the oath of allegiance on the fourteenth of March.
With two friends I went to the Capitol to witness the ceremony, and, as we had seats in the front of the gallery, we looked down directly upon a desk just below us, on which the Ordinance of Secession was spread out. One of my companions was a most passionate Unionist, and she pointed out the document with an unspeakable scorn and contempt. The House was crowded; it was really electrified with the fiery radiations of men tingling with passion, and glowing and burning with the anticipation of revengeful battle. And the air was full of the stirring clamor of a multitude of voices—angry, triumphant, scornful, with an occasional oath or epithet of contempt.
But when Houston appeared there was a sudden silence. It was the homage involuntarily paid to the man himself, not to his office. Firmly and clearly, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate States; but the Lieutenant-Governor, a certain Edward Clarke, was eager to do so. He was an insignificant creature, whose airy conceit was a direct insult to Houston’s sad countenance and dignified manner; and I remember well how contemptible he appeared, as spry and pert, he 227 stepped up to the bar of the House to take the oath. Just as he reached the desk, on which the Ordinance of Secession lay, my Unionist friend, a bright, clever girl, of about sixteen years old, leaned forward and spit directly on the centre of it. There was a little soft laughter from the women sympathizers who saw the action, and Clarke’s handkerchief lay for a moment on the historical parchment, but there was no remark, and the incident caused not the slightest interruption.
“Why did you do that, Lucille?” I asked.
“To express my opinion. Did you see Clarke’s handkerchief?”
“Yes.”
“Then I suppose he got what I sent. And it is in Clarke’s handkerchief! In Clarke’s pocket! Poor spittle! What an ignominy!”
Two days afterwards Clarke was made Governor in place of Houston. Changes in all the government offices were likely to follow, and I could not help feeling anxious concerning Robert’s position. About certain things he could be so stubborn. Men are made that way. They have prejudices, and they call them principles, and then—sink or swim, they stick to them.
Now an unreasonable detestation of slavery was one of Robert’s prejudices or principles. He would not allow that under any circumstance it could be right, and all his sympathies were with the slave. The majority of our small matrimonial frets were on this subject. If he had been compelled to tew with, and to bear every hour of the day the thieving, lying, and laziness of the three in our kitchen, his pity for their condition would have been much modified. I used to tell him this whenever the subject came up, but I could not make him understand my position, because he lifted his argument out of the personalities in our kitchen, and laid all their sins on the condition of slavery. If he had been an unmarried man, I am sure he would have gone to the Union army, but, being caught by circumstances in a southern city, where he had been generously and kindly treated, he felt, I think, much like Naaman, the Syrian, when he begged God’s pardon because circumstances compelled him to bow down in the house of Rimmon.