State Gazette Rebukes Houston’s Charge of Political Aggravation

“It is charged by Gen. Houston and a few of his immediate friends in this city, as we have learned, that the accounts of incendiarism in this State have been created or published for political effect, and his organ here [the Austin Southern Intelligencer newspaper] threatens us with the wrath of an indignant people, the same wrath we suppose which was sought to be discharged at our excellent Comptroller, but which has recoiled with ludicrous effect upon his impotent assailants.

We have published nothing but information furnished by reliable correspondents, extracted from respectable papers, including the burning of Dallas and Henderson and other places. The same publications have been made in the papers generally in the Sate, without regard to their political character. It is indeed true that we had the temerity to publish the facts connected with those outrages upon our fellow citizens, without regard to the interests of our abolition enemies, whose emissaries have been implicated in a conspiracy against the lives and property of our people but we never imagined that such publications could affect the interests of any political party in Texas, and draw down upon us the censure of any paper in the Sate. It is true that we have been practically disappointed, but yet we are charitable enough to attribute the unexpected results of the madness of bitter personal or political prejudice. We are not indeed, prepared to believe that any portion of our people are seeking to merit the favor of some future Black Republican President, but we deeply deplore the infatuation of those blind partisans who are ready to involve their country in a state of abject subjection and ignominious rum, in order to gratify their personal or political prejudices.

“Our readers will see that the committees of safety in the several counties which have taken steps to protect themselves have been composed of citizens of both parties. It is impossible that they could have been animated by any other motive than that of self-preservation and of patriotism which thank heaven is the peculiar or exclusive property of no one party in our State, but pervades the entire mass of our brave and intelligent people.”¹

¹Austin State Gazette, August 25, 1860.