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8o2 E. C. Barker to prevent an investigation. On July 21 Jackson v^Tote to Adams demanding that the letter which the latter had read on the seventh be returned to him, and that Adams explain how he had obtained it. The letter to Adams was sent to Blair to be delivered, but as Mayo meantime had made the necessary revelation, Jackson's letter to Adams was withheld.' Removed from the heat of debate, Adams's argument can hardly be regarded as serious. The general was not one to look ahead and manufacture evidence for a possible contingency, and if he wanted nothing done, why did he write at all? As a matter of fact, he heard something of Houston's wild vaporings more than a year and a half before Mayo told his startling story, and immediately in- structed Governor Pope to block any movement that might be made from Arkansas." All things considered, does the letter not evince an honest desire to get at the truth? There were sufficient diplomatic reasons for wishing to keep the investigation secret. Houston's alleged relation to the Texas revolution should here be noticed, too. He may have been nursing some Burr-like project in his active brain when he made his first visit to Texas. He did attend the Convention of April, 1833, and the constitution there adopted for the proposed state of Texas — which, be it remembered, was to remain a member of the Mexican confederation — was largely his work. But his life is a blank to history for the next two years, and it is not till past the middle of 1835, when the revolution was well under way, that we find him at Nacogdoches, speaking at a ' The letter to Adams which Jackson sent to Blair and also the draft are among the Jackson MSS. See also Blair to Jackson, July 30, 1838 ; Blair to Jackson, August 2, 1838; Jackson to Howard, August 2, 1838; Jackson to Blair, August 9, 1838; Blair to Jackson, August 23, 1838; B. C. Howard to Jackson, August 29, 1838; Jackson MSS. Jackson to Blair, August 14, 1838; Van Buren MSS. Mayo's letter to Gales and Seaton, National Intelligencer, August 2, 1838. 2 Jackson to Van Buren, January 23, 1838. Van Buren MSS. "I have searched my Executive Book, — I can find no letter written by me to Secretary of the Territory of Arkansa Judge Fulton about the tenth of December 1830, on the subject of Texas or Mexico, but I have found the following memorandom on my memorandom Book it is as follows, ' May 21st, 1829. Genl Duff Green has furnished me with an extract of a letter from Doctor Marable to Genl Green, containing declarations of Governor Houston, late of Tennessee, that he would conquer Mexico, or Texas and be worth two Millions in two years etc. etc. Believing this to be the mere efusions of a distempered brain, but as a mere precautionary measure I have directed the Secretary of War to write, and enclose to Governor Pope of Arkansa this extract, and to instruct him to make diligent enquiry and if such illegal project should be discovered to exist, to adopt prompt measures to put it down and to give to the Government the earliest intelligence of such illegal enterprise, with the names of all those who may be concerned therein." " See Van Buren's letter to Jackson, January 10, 1838. Van Buren MSS. 3 Copy in Edward, History of Texas. 196-205.