The General replied with characteristic dignity: "Gentlemen, I thank you for your personal considerations, but I have seen stormy times in Texas before, and I have seen my personal friends tremble for my safety before; but, gentlemen, I shall make the speech to-day at eleven o'clock A. M., as already given out, from the upper gallery of the Tremont House—should be pleased to see you there, gentlemen, to hear, and if necessary to help keep order."
One of the parties to the interview came into our office and reported what had passed. The writer had then never seen the General, and felt a strong desire to go and hear the "old war-horse," but concluded, being a stranger in the country, and not wishing to be caught in the presence of a mob, not to go. Eleven o'clock came, and twelve, and some one came in and said: "Houston is speaking, and has been for an hour, and all is quiet." We went and heard the balance of his speech. After seeing and hearing him a few minutes we did not wonder he was not disturbed by a mob.
There he stood, an old man of seventy years, on the balcony ten feet above the heads of the thousands assembled to hear him, where every eye could scan his magnificent form, six feet and three inches high, straight as an arrow, with deep set and penetrating eyes, looking out from under heavy and thundering eyebrows, a high open forehead, with something of the infinite intellectual shadowed there, crowned with thin white locks, partly erect, seeming to give capillary conduction to the electric fluid used by his massive brain, and a voice of the deep basso tone, which shook and commanded the soul of the hearer. Adding to all this a powerful manner, made up of deliberation, self-possession and restrained majesty of action, leaving the hearer impressed with the feeling that more of his power was hidden than revealed. Thus appeared Sam Houston on this grand occasion, equal and superior to it, as he always was to every other. He paralyzed the arm of the mobocrat by his personal presence, and it was morally impossible for him to be mobbed in Texas, and if not there then not anywhere; no, not even in that hot country which, as the Boston divine said, "modesty forbids us to name," and which, in this respect, is the best synonym for it, and rival of it, we can imagine.
CHAPTER X.
SAM HOUSTON'S SPEECH.
The drift of Houston's speech was—the inexpediency and bad policy of secession.
He told them they could secure without secession what they proposed to secure by it, and would certainly lose through it. He gave the greater force to his declarations by appealing to them to know if he had not generally been right in the past history of Texas, when any great issue was at stake. Told them he made Texas and they knew it, and it was not immodest for him to say so; that the history of old Sam Houston was the history of Texas, and they knew it; that he fought and won the battle of annexation, and they knew it; that he originally organized and established the Republic of Texas, and they knew it; that he wrested Texas from the despotic sway of Santa Anna; that he commanded at San Jacinto, where the great Mexican leader was whipped and captured, and they knew it.