Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  In their lonely clearings and isolated dog-run houses, women went for days and weeks without seeing a neighbor, and without the security and comforts of the civilization they had left.

  The agriculture and land-breaking of the Texas heartland impressed few foreign travelers. Techniques were hardly improved, except for steel plows, from biblical times. Europe was far ahead in the practice of intensive farming, and the American Midwest was already forging ahead of Europe in mass agriculture based on broad fields and new machinery. Only a few of the most far-seeing visitors noted that Texas above the cotton belt had few social handicaps, such as absentee land tenure or a settled peasantry. Most noted instead that the European peasant lived better than the average Anglo pioneer.

  The one remarkable aspect of this frontier, however, was its literacy and general political awareness. In 1860 there were seventy-one newspapers in Texas, with a total circulation of about 100,000. Ninety-five percent of the white population could read and write and some publication reached virtually every family. No European nation of the time could boast a better average, certainly not among its poorest, rural population. In this sense, Texas was truly an extension of Anglo-America. If it lacked the seeds of culture, it had already put down the roots of civilization: literacy and schools.

  The newspapers, daily and weekly, were devoted more to political comment than the dissemination of factual news. Ordinary events, such as disasters or personal news, were rarely printed. There was no telegraph south of New Orleans; also, taste prohibited the mentioning of women's names in public print. But papers devoted themselves to the public issues of the hour, from the local to the national scene. Editorial writing in the backwoods was an art before newspapers became mere advertising media. This writing was often irate, biased, and misinformed—but much of it was clear and sound. It kept the freeholders of Texas fully aware of events; many farmers could quote Senator Stephen Douglas or Sam Houston at length. Texans were already keen political animals.

  Like the newspaper publishers and printing presses, the schoolmasters and curriculum were imported from the older states. Although there had been no official provisions for public schools until 1854, when the windfall from the New Mexico boundary settlement was made available, the frontier counties as well as the older regions already had an adequate educational system. The settlers worried much about the education of their children, both boys and girls. As soon as a dozen or more families were located in any region or new-made county, the farmers tried to organize a school. A building was thrown up or made available; a schoolmaster was imported from the East. Every family shared the costs of the teacher's salary, which as often as not was paid in land or kind. No schoolteacher in Texas went hungry or failed to find a place of honor at any table.

  In the antebellum period the courts held that the creation of county school districts, and the assessment of general taxes for education, was unconstitutional. It was not, however, considered illegal for the state to reimburse parents for each child enrolled in a recognized school. The government paid out, beginning in 1854, sixty-two cents per year per student, without regard to the nature of the school: private, parochial, or "field." This amount was raised to $1.50 in 1855. Most Texans in the rural areas attended "field schools"—a school which families in a community or region had established by providing a building and hiring a teacher, on their own. Thus there were no direct taxes, and the state monies went a long way toward paying the cost of instructors. Books were not a great problem, because only a few—primers, readers, and simple arithmetic texts—were used. The system was both public and private, but it created no constitutional or social problems. The population was remarkably homogeneous, almost tribal in its culture, and the education provided was sufficient for the time and place.

  Those small groups outside the Anglo mass, Roman Catholics or Mexicans, either had their own schools organized the same way or were indifferent to education. No true public school system was established prior to the War Between the States. And since there was so little foreign immigration, the notion of the public school as an "Americanizing agency" simply never arose. Boys and girls went to school to learn certain essentials to fit them for their future life, not as part of any planned social process. The graduate of a field school, with a grade school education, was completely fitted to extend American civilization as he knew it further west. Culture and philosophy were not Anglo-American concerns. Neither had any real function on a frontier where everyone had to work. Yet an enormous amount of both was transmitted through the Holy Scriptures, which were used as a text in most schools. And the Protestant or "American" ethic was preserved and enhanced also by these local schools, quite unconsciously, because it was the ethic and culture of the land; teachers and pupils shared it and had learned it before they even went to school. It was this last that eventually made Roman Catholic immigrants increasingly concerned about "public" education, and led the clergy to establish its own schools in a long and in the end futile attempt to isolate Catholic children from Anglo culture.

  The historical role of the English Bible in this Texas has increasingly been overlooked. But the King James Version afforded this stultified civilization on the fringes of the 19th-century Western world with a great part of the basic culture it required. It gave the frontier farmer what later Soviet poets tried to transmit and preserve in Russia under Communism: a basic folklore, philosophy, and literature. It was, in fact, almost the only literature most families possessed.

  The Old Testament fitted easily into the 19th-century Texas world. Its revelations of the human condition were held, even by the nonreligious, to be entirely valid and timelessly true. The young Texan read of evil that was ancient and ever-present, requiring eternal discipline of man; he learned of false prophets and lying sycophants, of licentious Jezebels and foolish kings, of mighty warriors and wise men. He absorbed an unflattering impression of such intellectual tribes as Scribes and Pharisees. And although few could articulate it or explain it, Texans gained a timeless portrait of man's world, of the rise and fall of peoples, of bondage and deliverance, of God's patience and wrath, and man's enduring inhumanity to man. Visitors were often surprised to find Texans, who had no apparent cultivation, able to strip vanities and euphoric philosophies from better-educated men. As a cultural, folkloric instrument the Holy Bible played its part, in a way no official history or intellectually fabricated philosophy ever could.

  There was a developing higher education, too. In 1859, Baylor University, a Baptist institution, awarded twenty-two bachelor degrees. There were forty academies, thirty-seven colleges, twenty-seven institutes, seven universities, two seminaries, and one medical college. These terms were then loosely used, but this was an impressive total. All these schools were private, and the great majority were denominational. They were established and supported initially by the more highly developed society in the older states. Both through its schools and its continuing stream of Eastern-educated lawyers moving west, the frontier was chained inescapably to the region behind; the last frontier was an extension of American society already made. The farmers supported themselves, but the literacy and the outlook of the region could not have been supported without the steady flow of young teachers, professors, clergymen, lawyers, and academicians arriving daily in the West. Thus all the "Western" cultures that derived from, or arose on, the frontier were and had to be abortive.

  The hundreds of thousands of independent subsistence farmers staking out lands in Texas were the mass of its people and the salt of its earth, but the distinguishing ethics, ideals, and social customs of the state were not transmitted by dour Missourians on the frontier or red-necked farmers from Alabama or Tennessee. The yeoman farmers of Texas were not much different from their colleagues in Kansas or Illinois; all initially came from the same frontier stock. But the great difference between Texas and the other regions of the West was that Texas had a planter class. The cotton planters, not the farming middle class, stamped the lasting standards of conduct
upon the Lone Star State.

  Planters came with the first Anglo-Texans; in fact, Stephen Austin's immigrants were heavily composed of this class. The true frontier farming element did not begin to arrive until twenty years later. Understandably, both because of early settlement and social and financial prominence, the planters formed the apex of society in Texas. They were not a ruling class, but they exerted a profound influence on government, manners, and thought, out of all proportion to their numbers, which were always small.

  Southern capitalism took a different turn from that developed in the North. The Texas capitalist had two ingredients to work with, fresh lands and Negro slaves. Out of this land and forced labor he created new capital, which almost universally was reinvested in more land and more slaves. The system was vitally different from the incipient industry in the North in two respects: the surplus produced, cotton or sugar, was sold overseas or to the industrial North, and thus the economy remained colonial. And Negro slavery, introduced by the English in the 17th century as a purely economic expedient—there never was, and never would be, sufficient white agricultural labor in America—was institutionalized as a way of life.

  Both developments, historically, were enormous social errors. Yet in 1800, or even several decades later, as Toynbee speculated, this was not apparent. The plantation system of the South produced more wealth, and a greater surplus of capital, than the rocky soils of New England or the forests of the Middle Atlantic States. There were rich merchants in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, but none of these compared in grandeur to Harrisons, Carters, Rutledges, or Middletons, baronial planters not only with vast estates, but with impressive educations and law degrees. It appeared that the Southern concept of America would prevail, particularly after the invention of the cotton gin and the explosion of the plantation economy west. But this explosion and expansion was remarkably static; like the advance of the Roman Empire after the time of Caesar, it spread the old culture and created nothing new.

  The South, from Virginia to Texas, remained agricultural, because its leading men were agriculturists, and because soils, climate, and the existence of a growing slave population were superbly fitted to the accretion of latifundia. A noticeable trend in colonial America was the movement south of many New Englanders in search of opportunity; North Carolina and Georgia were brought into the American Revolution by transplanted Yankees. Few, if any, of these 18th-century migrants who succeeded—as lawyers, doctors, merchants, or overseers—failed to acquire Negroes and set themselves up as Southern gentlemen. This indicates that geography more than morality permitted the American North and West to escape the incubus of Negro slavery. The fact that Northern shipmasters furnished Virginia and the Carolinas with their original slave stock indicates the same.

  It is also very clear that the Southern concept of America failed because the plantation system failed to make any impression on the American West above the Ohio. The vast Middle West and Far West were economically and socially allied with the North and Northeast. Without the millions of freeholders in this West, the abolitionists of Boston and the industrialists of the Middle Atlantic could never have politically or militarily dominated the American South. Just as geography turned the North in other ways, geography finally assured that the glittering cotton kingdom would never be more than an American enclave. In 1860, the plantation system was within a hundred miles, roughly, of its farthest natural limits at the edge of the Texas Plains.

  Very few of the Founding Fathers of the United States, from ethical reasons, favored human slavery. Even the conservative George Washington, probably from association with Lafayette and Jefferson, experienced qualms. Just as the Englishman was poorly fitted by his law, ethic, and experience to "make a slave of any man," Americans were similarly badly suited to hold Negroes in bondage. Yet, in 1776, the problem was seen as economic. Slavery had to be accepted by the Union, or else there would have been no Union. Carolina would not ally with or enter into a confederation that did not respect its domestic property. It is also clear that at least until the 1820s, the principal opposition to slavery on moral or ethical grounds centered in Virginia and the South. Ironically, abolitionism collapsed in the South just as it began to become virulent in the North. There was a strong infusion of regional politics, economic differences, and political ideology in each case.

  The Southern states' view of the Union as a confederacy of sovereign entities was constitutionally more valid than the North's growing concept of a common market, with common economic and social regulation, and the Southern defense of low tariffs was a completely logical argument based on self-interest. There was no more reason for a Southern cotton grower to sacrifice anything to build an American industrial machine than for a Northern industrialist to be tied to an agricultural national policy. In the course of human events, sooner or later, one region or the other had to be subordinated or the Union dissolved. Even the English-speaking genius for political pragmatism and compromise could not paper over the split forever. But the terrible weakness of the Southern economy was not its colonial vulnerability but its dependence upon Negroes. By the middle of the 19th century slavery was no longer in tune with the times. The mere existence of slavery gave the North an enormous moral weapon to make the average man, who was somewhat indifferent to the constitutional question of whether the Union was a confederacy or unitary state or whether industrialism should be helped or hampered by law, fanatic enough to be willing to fight. At the same time, the aroused fear of enforced Negro equality among Southern freeholders produced a similar fanaticism below the Ohio. One reason the Northern states could be sanguine about emancipation, then and later, was because almost all the Negroes were in the South.

  Aside from the emotional questions of right or wrong, or subordination and equality, emancipation by 1860 had become economically unreasonable. In Texas, the assessed value of all slaves was $106,688,920—20 percent more than the assessed value of all cultivated lands. Whatever its moral capital, the South had invested its economic capital in blacks. Like many another capitalist or dominant group before and since, the Southern gentry, in coping with a labor problem, had fallen into a terrible cultural and racial trap. It was more vulnerable to criticism than either the Northern industrialist paying out slave wages or a government using forced labor, because the cotton planter was creating no fruits for the descendants of his workers to enjoy. The great mass of Negroes were never expected to rise out of bondage. And the profits of the plantation economy were rapidly creating a new leisure class that, however admirable in many respects, was already an anachronism in the 19th-century Western world.

  Seen in perspective, the Texas cotton planter was of all Americans closest to the old gentry or squirearchy of the Atlantic slopes. There was not much difference, in education, outlook, ethic, or manners, between a Texas cotton grower in 1860 and one of Long Island's landed gentry a hundred years before. Both held vast estates, both hunted and rode their fields, both believed in lavish hospitality, both were intimately engaged in public affairs. Neither considered their kind an aristocracy on the European order, but rather the natural leaders of a society of freemen. Nothing is clearer than that the "deferential society" of colonial America, with its ethical liberalism, economic conservatism, and somewhat organic outlook, survived all the way to Texas, while concurrently it dissolved in the North. There was no real regression—but there was little change. More than any other group in the 19th century, the planters tended to perpetuate the manners, ideals, traditions, politics, and codes of the gentry that founded the United States. But where Washington, the Adamses, the Morrisses, Livingstons, Monroes, and others once led an agricultural American society, the Texas planter now existed in an American nation where 92 percent of the productive power and two-thirds of the people had abandoned deferential ways. He was still powerful and respected in his region, but he was beginning to be despised nationally, for reasons that went far beyond slavery.

  As both its politics and literature show, the Ame
rican North meanwhile had gone through a process of vulgarization, immigration, economic growth, and political change. The Northern gentry never extended beyond the valley of the Hudson or the center of Pennsylvania, and where they stood, they were submerged.

  While the puritan, egalitarian society of the frontier developed unhindered through Ohio westward, a combination of European immigration, rising industrial wealth, decline of the old rational ethic, and the increasing turbulence, violence, and economic fanaticism of America itself sapped the original gentry. As lethal as anything was the growing power and concept of money, which seemed to have a deadly effect on the public spirit and instincts of the squirearchy. And in its way, the westward movement destroyed the old liberal, ethical America: the nation exploded across the continent, killing Indians and Mexicans, building a vast economy and a dynamic industrial machine. All of this seemed to happen without rational decision or control; the governments of America merely kept adjusting or reacting or rationalizing to events already in full swing. The Eastern gentry were generally in favor of none of these things; they could not prevent them. The election of Andrew Jackson was not a blow against the gentry, but merely a symptom of its decline and of the rise of a new necessity for America: the political party, and the political boss, and the alliance between groups and regions rather than compromises worked out by a few men. The gentry had always been regional in outlook, fighting for a strong Federalism only to assure credit and good order. But the rise of the first political boss, Martin Van Buren, without whom Jackson could not have reached the White House, indicated a new kind of Federalism was in the wind. At the same time, the precipitation of a financial panic by the gentry opposed to the first President "from the people" indicated starkly the bankruptcy of what had once been America's most ethical group or class, and showed that the American people, perhaps, needed a new type of tribune. By the 1830s, it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish a genuine American gentry. The old families had increasingly declined into a mere financial or industrial upper class, whose rational ethos was already operating on a kind of Darwinism before Charles Darwin popularized his limited studies of what was then thought to be the way of all life.