Letter from Gen. James Hamilton. [Oyster Creek, Brasoria County, Texas]

To the People of South Carolina.

...But it seems that Texas has surrendered some four degrees of latitude of slave territory to freesoilism. In point of fact, Texas has not surrendered one inch of territory in which slavery could exist for two years. Slaves might as well be taken to the Artic coasts as to the territory in question. It would take a gang of negroes from January to Christmas to hunt buffalo to support themselves for the year, and do nothing else. Their hunt for water for six months in the year would be far less successful, for the clouds forget, in that country, to dispense their benefaction formt he vernal to the autumnal Equinox; cursed with the aridity of Arabia Deserta in has the agreeable althernation of climate which belongs to the Equator and Zembia's frozen coast. I will venture to assert that a premium of five hundred dollars, with the condition of keeping him there, would not induce a slaveholder to carry his negro and plant him above El Paso. If he escaped the coercive gripe and theft of the Comanche, he would be sure to be invited to taste the sweets of liberty under the fraternizing hug of some Mexican Anacharisis Cloots. The idea of slavery in such a country is too preposterous to be entertained for one moment....

....I see that my esteemed friend, Mr. Burt, of Abbeville, has told his constituents that the inhibition of slavery in California has prevented their realizing fifteen hundred dollars per annum, to the hand, in her mines. Admit this to be a most veritable vaticination. I would like to ask how many negroes would be left in old Abbeville, under such a tempting lure, to cultivate its rigid and reluctant soil? Why such a premium on slave labor would have depopulated the South- the Mississippi bottoms and the alluvial levels of the creek could not have sustained the competititon. We would have lost our negro labor, whilst our ague and congestive fever would have abided. Many more fertile protions of the South would be cursed by the blight of irreversible desolation. The fern and the fennel would have taken the place of of the cotton plant, and we should have had restored for every negro transported to California from Old Abbeville, one of the aboringinal settlers of the country- the fox and the wolf.

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David Upton