The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 57, July 1953 - April, 1954 Page: 389

Aotes ard DocYm#ts
Address to the People of the State of Zexas
HE following address is listed in E. W. Winkler, Check
List of Texas Imprints, 1846-z86o, as item 1334. This
is one of the ground swells which led to the Texas Seces-
sion Convention. Only two copies are known to be in existence:
one in the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center at the Uni-
versity of Texas and the other, which came from the Beauregard
Bryan papers, was contributed by Thomas W. Streeter of Morris-
town, New Jersey, to the Association's annual auction in 1949
and through purchase became a part of the private collection of
Frank Caldwell of Austin, Texas.
Winkler describes the document as follows:
Galveston county, Texas. Committee of safety.
Address to the people of the State of Texas. . . . [Since the
Governor declines to convene the Legislature to act in the present
crisis, this Committee appeals to the whole people of Texas to join
with them in electing delegates to a convention at the time and in
the mode recommended by the people of Harris county.] By order
of the Committee of safety and correspondence. Guy M. Bryan, cor-
responding secretary. [Galveston, Dec. 29th, 186o.] Folder with one
page of print, in three columns. 21.5 x 26.5 cm. (17 x 18.5 cm.)
The situation of the State of Texas, in the present unhappy
exigencies that press on the country, is different from that of
her Southern sisters. The perpetration of a wanton and gross
outrage by a strictly Northern sectional vote-insulting as it is
to the honor and menacing as it is to the welfare of the slave-
holding States-demands of them all alike, a stern and prompt
resistance. Recognizing this fact, and sympathising with the
people of the South, the Governors of nearly all of the Southern
States, have convened their Legislatures, where a call was necessary
to assemble them, and given to their people the use of their
regular and lawful means of expressing their sense of the impor-
tance of the emergency, and of consulting as to the mode of
meeting it. Gov. Houston's studied silence in this juncture, not
only deprives us of our right to use the machinery of the State