rage with increasing fury as it draws to its crisis, but for the
management of which my age, infirmities, and approaching end
totally disqualify me. There is no such man in the House."

September 15, 1837, he says: "I have been for some time occupied day
and night, when at home, in assorting and recording the petitions and
remonstrances against the annexation of Texas, and other (p. 256)
anti-slavery petitions, which flow upon me in torrents." The next day
he presented the singular petition of one Sherlock S. Gregory, who had
conceived the eccentric notion of asking Congress to declare him "an
alien or stranger in the land so long as slavery exists and the wrongs
of the Indians are unrequited and unrepented of." September 28 he
presented a batch of his usual petitions, and also asked leave to
offer a resolution calling for a report concerning the coasting trade
in slaves. "There was what Napoleon would have called a superb NO!
returned to my request from the servile side of the House." The next
day he presented fifty-one more like documents, and notes having
previously presented one hundred and fifty more.

In December, 1837, still at this same work, he made a hard but
fruitless effort to have the Texan remonstrances and petitions sent to
a select committee instead of to that on foreign affairs which was
constituted in the Southern interest. On December 29 he "presented
several bundles of abolition and anti-slavery petitions," and said
that, having declared his opinion that the gag-rule was unconstitutional,
null, and void, he should "submit to it only as to physical force."
January 3, 1838, he presented "about a hundred petitions, (p. 257)
memorials, and remonstrances,--all laid on the table." January 15 he
presented fifty more. January 28 he received thirty-one petitions, and
spent that day and the next in assorting and filing these and others
which he previously had, amounting in all to one hundred and twenty.
February 14, in the same year, was a field-day in the petition campaign:
he presented then no less than three hundred and fifty petitions, all
but three or four of which bore more or less directly upon the slavery
question. Among these petitions was one

"praying that Congress would take measures to protect citizens
from the North going to the South from danger to their lives.
When the motion to lay that on the table was made, I said that,
'In another part