Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  There were no paved town streets anywhere, and aside from a few mansions such as Wyalucing in Marshall, the most imposing buildings in any town consisted of the courthouse and the public hotel.

  The average hotel of the day was typical of the fringe of civilization: dirty, without services or courtesy, with guests assigned to common rooms and lucky to get them. Food was indifferent, mainly consisting of fried pork. The opening of the Menger, in San Antonio, was the beginning of a new era, connecting Texas with the Golden West. The Menger Hotel was built beside the crumbling walls of the chapel of the Alamo, whose outer walls had already been taken away for fence and building stones. The Menger was finely made, by European artisans, out of stone, two-and-a-half stories high. The furnishings were hauled in from the coast at enormous expense; they cost $16,000, when the U.S. dollar was worth fifteen to twenty times its later value. Here army officers, California travelers, or hacendados up from Mexico could bathe, dine, and drink in solid Victorian splendor. A graying lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army, Robert E. Lee, had a favorite room in this hotel. The Menger, and most hotels, however, were too rich for the average transient, who bunked down in wagon yards.

  Almost anything, useful or luxurious, could be bought in San Antonio, Galveston, or other major towns. Everything arrived out of Europe or the North, usually via New Orleans, and with heavy mark-ups. Anyone with good money could purchase ice, jewelry, finely made guns, drugs, clothing, cosmetics, and good liquors. This trade was limited to a tiny, affluent class. The farmer families bought salt, powder, and lead, and sometimes a few yard goods on the side. Texas, except for a few, still did not represent a money economy.

  The laws against incorporation of banks kept banks out of the state. Banking services, therefore, were carried on by freighting or mercantile firms, such as McKinney and Williams in Galveston, Groos in San Antonio and on the border, and a commission firm in Austin. These businesses and others like them held money on deposit, and made occasional loans. McKinney and Williams at last opened the first and only bank in Texas prior to 1861, through the use of an old State of Texas–Coahuila charter issued under Mexican rule in 1835 and a loophole in the law. The utter lack of banks and banking facilities, naturally, had a deadening effect on potential financial or industrial growth, but this was precisely the way the farmer-planter-dominated legislatures preferred it.

  What money there was took three forms. Depreciated banknotes from the United States circulated widely. These were not federal notes, because no paper money was issued by the United States until the Civil War; some of this paper was issued by wildcat, or even nonexistent, banks in other states. Passers and accepters had sometimes to guess its worth. Promissory notes were traded between businessmen and merchants like cash. When hard money was essential, the major medium of exchange was old Spanish or Mexican silver pesos or dollars and their fractions. Very little gold or silver U.S. coinage had penetrated Texas.

  Until 1857, these foreign coins were legal tender in the United States, and they continued to circulate in Texas freely until the end of the century. It was customary to smash the image of the King of Spain on the older coins with a hammer, or to deface the Mexican eagle. Such mutilation in no way damaged bullion value and did assuage national pride.

  The census of 1860 listed over one hundred different occupations in Texas. Since far more than half of the people were farmers, the other occupations were centered in settlements and towns. There were 2,000 merchants, big and small, and the same number who claimed to be carpenters. There seem to have been enough wheelwrights, blacksmiths, masons, saddle makers, and foundrymen to satisfy the demand. A very high percentage of merchants and skilled artisans in Texas were foreign, or Northern born. The ordinary Anglo clung to farming.

  There were only two factories in the state. One made hats, and the other, clothing. Both employed slave labor. There was almost no such thing as hired labor, except for a few Mexicans. Mechanics worked for themselves, and the permanent residents of towns were almost entirely professional men, merchants, or artisans.

  If the supply of entrepreneurs was limited, there was almost a plague of lawyers. Marshall, with only 1,000 people in all, had twenty-eight members of the bar. There were a thousand licensed barristers in Texas in 1860, and this was a continuing trend. There were two reasons. Law was the most honored profession in nonindustrial America, and the principal career open to educated men. Further, the frontier pulled lawyers in droves from older states, just as it attracted medical doctors in large numbers.

  In these years there were even more doctors of medicine than lawyers scattered across the breadth of Texas. Then the situation was almost exactly the reverse of later times; economic and social opportunity was far greater on the frontier for professionally educated men than in the older sections of America. Young doctors or lawyers had to compete with established practices in the East; on the edge of civilization all men started equal. One good case, and a lawyer or doctor could be made. Lawyers could quickly build large landed estates and become planters; doctors could do the same. Professional fees were relatively steep. British travelers, for example, complained bitterly of the exorbitant costs of medical care compared to England.

  Texas lawyers and doctors and dentists (who enjoyed much lower status) were sketchily trained by later standards, and most were trained in other states. They were not nearly so professional or restricted in their careers as later. A horde of both lawyers and doctors accompanied every Texas filibustering or military expedition; it was not unusual to find doctors commanding armed parties rather than acting strictly as medical men. Doctors, in the South, slipped in and out of the military role as easily as lawyers or planters.

  Before the War Between the States, there were only three actors, no writers, and two Negro businessmen in Texas.

  There is a certain futility to exploring true cultural activities on the frontier, because in general they did not exist. The discussion of these by Texas historians is a defensive measure, like the sometime attempt of Catholic historians to establish a Catholic presence in the American Revolution. The few examples stand out, because they were exceptional.

  San Antonio, with its European influences, had its Casino Club, where at times there were both distinguished guests and entertainment. Elsewhere, there were occasional road tours by traveling troupes. Culture, like the cotton kingdom, remained colonial; it had to be brought in. This frontier, unlike the Iranic and Hellenic frontiers of ancient times, did not spawn any kind of cultural vigor. Such activity was not part of the genius or the ethic of the English-speaking race.

  Because the society, and social leaders, were rural, social activities were private and centered more around prominent homes than in the towns. This was to be a lasting tradition; no public place could ever compete with planter hospitality. Genteel people in Texas retreated to their country places. This had a permanent, damaging effect on the growth of cities and towns.

  The planters, and generally the more affluent townspeople, possessed the usual culture of all squirearchies, especially those of short tradition. They read imported books, sent their children away to school, conversed about public affairs, enjoyed relaxed, enormous meals; they hunted and rode. Languor in polite company was matched by furious activity in the saddle. All such atmospheres, of course, tend to be unintellectual, though hardly unintelligent.

  The artisans were not very influential toward cultural attitudes, but the slaves had already formed a sort of culture of their own, which naturally was separate from that of the dominant whites.

  The culture of the most numerous white farming population was still centered around biblical influences and the backwoods churches. The church meetings had become almost as much social as religious activities, and because there were no offsetting influences in the farmers' lives, the churches began to exert a dominant influence that colored Texas and has not always been recognized. The pressure was not so much religious or spiritual—though this was strong—as social. It generated stron
g drives toward temperance, fundamentalism, tribalism, and social democracy. The Baptist and Methodist persuasions, which were by far the largest in the state, were brotherhoods under lay control rather than organic, hierarchical churches which preached catholicity while recognizing social distinctions. The influences of the Baptist Church, and similar organizations, all strongly puritanical, seeped through all the people who were to form the emerging frontier middle class. This was no fundamental change from the regions farther east below the Ohio, but in Texas, because of lasting frontier conditions, the frontier denominations had a more lasting effect upon society.

  Thus the codes, patterns, practices, outlook, and beginnings of virtually all Texan institutions were in being by 1860, if not in all cases fully developed. Most of these would prove too strong to be swept away with the wind that was already rising in the North.

  Part IV

  THE CONFEDERACY AND THE CONQUERED

  Chapter 18

  SECESSION

  The North has gone overwhelmingly for Negro Equality and Southern Vassalagel Southern Men, will you submit to the degradation?

  EDITORIAL, NAVARRO, TEXAS, NEWSPAPER, 1860

  IN the 1850s, concurrent with the growth of the cotton kingdom and expansion of the western frontier, a smoldering atmosphere of political crisis was brewing in Texas. This was part of the larger social and economic crisis that was enveloping the United States, separating the North and South. The real enemy of the North was Southern political power, insisting upon the strictest construction of the Constitution in a defense of states' rights that hindered and hamstrung industrialism and infuriated Eastern bankers, railroad magnates, and manufacturers. The true enemy of the South was industrialism itself, which threatened its agriculture with a worse colonialism and the destruction of its Constitutional rights in a flood of money and material goods. The two sections, doing what came naturally, had built two quite different societies; as Toynbee wrote, and few Americans have ever been willing to accept, the Valley of the Ohio marked at least as great a cultural line as the gates of the Danube below Vienna. If "Europe" ended at Vienna, one kind of America stopped at the Ohio.

  With genuine economic and political grievances against each other, the Northern states and the South found their flashpoint in the question of Negro slavery. The Negro question made the states' rights question so crucial and violent. The South insisted upon states' rights to maintain the status quo, which the North was increasingly determined to alter. If a balance of viewpoint could have been maintained, some eventual, bloodless solution might possibly have been worked out. The essence of English-speaking politics, as more than one foreign observer has noted, depends upon no side or faction taking stands that may not, or cannot, be compromised by rational men.

  The British Empire ended Negro slavery in the 19th century by both abolition and reimbursement. Other nations went through a process of gradual emancipation. None of these solutions was perfect; starting with the incubus of human servitude, no social solution could be perfect. But even this hopeful approach was torpedoed by two American developments: Southern intransigence that amounted to belligerency, and a Northern equation of slavery with sin.

  Calhoun's premise that the South could defend its peculiar interests and institutions only by going on the attack and controlling the federal apparatus, and a growing Northern refusal to treat slavery as a political and social, but not a moral problem, led the whole American body politic into a vast morass. The South, always with a growing insecurity and terrible problem of rationale, went into a psychosis mentality, while the North deteriorated from a reasonable moral stance into crusade.

  Most reasonable men in the South were aware that slavery was condemned by the entire civilized world. The trouble was that the South, having fallen into the trap, had compelling social and economic reasons for continuing Negro bondage. The fear that a larger, richer, and more populous North would eventually control the national political machinery, and enforce its own concepts of morality and society upon the South, was hardly unfounded; it was a natural trend. The extreme stand against change—wrapped, as always in America, in a Constitutional cloak—was clearly the mark of a badly insecure and intellectually tortured society.

  But on the other hand, much of the North did not comprehend the social and status implications inherent in the presence of a large, subordinate, and racially differentiated mass of people with the boundaries of certain states. Slavery pricked the Northern conscience, but the slaves themselves did not impinge upon Northern society.

  If the farmer class in Texas had absorbed different ideas and ideals of society from the planters, they also differed from Middle Western farmers in another striking way. The slave system created a terrible sense of insecurity in Texas and the South. The institution of Negro slavery was not really popular with the more than 400,000 white Texans—95 percent of the population—who owned none, although they had grown up with it and considered it normal. What was sometimes not understood fully in the North was that the average white Texan feared a Negro insurrection as much as the slavemaster, because a slave revolt threw all whites in danger. Also, the white farmers supported the institution of slavery vehemently, because virtually all of them were adamantly opposed to Negro equality. Tirades against black "equality" speckled the Texas newspapers of the 1850s; these editorials were written by members of the professional middle classes. The evidence is strong that no Western farm states had much regard for the Negro as a man—even after the conclusion of the Civil War many Northern states denied the franchise to freedmen. But the Wisconsin farmer did not feel insecure toward the Negro, because he did not live up against the slave horde.

  This fear of Negro disorder and fear of Negro competition inevitably kept a flame of hatred for the Negro alive in the heart of the average Texan. This was not unusual in any historical sense. It was a characteristic of all societies based on the subordination of one differentiated group to another, from Norman Sicily in the Middle Ages to Hispanic America. The Negro lived in another country from the white farmer; he was a faceless mass; he was hardly thought of as human. The men who owned, and even abused, slaves tended to think of them in more personal terms, as human beings, than those who watched and feared them from a short distance.

  The interesting thing is that these recognizable social manifestations of fear of encirclement and social change, producing a predictable belligerence, affected the people most immediately endangered the least. The slowly gathering drive toward secession sentiment—if the South could not control the Union, then it should get out—was a mass, popular movement, led by professional politicians and lawyers and supported hugely by the voting middle class. The great slaveowners seem to have been as appalled by gathering radicalism as Lincoln was horrified by the supporters of John Brown. There were simple, logical reasons: the substantial men were as always conservative toward continuity and law and order. Most large planters were old-time Whigs; Constitutionalism to them meant support of the American Constitution by carrying on the battle by legal means, not "upholding" it by rupture. The evidence shows that in Texas, and in some other states, the planters were willing to follow John C. Calhoun in an effort to capture the Democratic Party, but when this effort waned and the strict "Constitutionalists" veered toward secession, the great landowners remained Unionist. Men of property, they did not relish casting adrift on uncharted, radical-tossed seas.

  The states' rights movement was one more of hysteria than logic, because ironically, the Constitution was the planter-slaveowners' greatest prop. While Lincoln's statement that the nation could not continue forever as a house divided—that either the slave states or the free states would enforce their concept of legality on the other—was essentially true, the Constitution still gave the slaveowners enormous room to fight. The Dred Scott decision stands as a case in point. It was impossible for the organic, 19th-century American law to ignore property rights; the law had been building an intricate maze of support for property rights for more than
a generation. The planters were actually in a position in which, with enough senators in Washington to block significant political change for years to come, they could sit back and watch the Abolitionists become psychotic.

  Abolition, then, was impractical both from economic and psychological reasons in Texas. But the great dilemma of the nation was that black subordination was not morally supportable, and both North and South grew increasingly psychotic over the issue. The South defended slavery as coequal with the American law and way of life, while the North stubbornly refused to reward "sin." This infusion of moral stands and principles into national politics was hardly invigorating; it was disastrous. It made political compromise, the cement of the nation, impossible, and it destroyed the single, necessary unifying force, the national political parties. Two newer, aggressive political groups sprouted from the mouldering remains of the two former national parties, the Constitutional or Calhoun Democrats of the South, and the Republicans of the North. Both split off significant groups from the older Whigs, who disappeared. The influential planter class in the South, which had been largely Whig, deserted to the Democrats and briefly captured that Party. The Whig Eastern financial and business interests swelled Republicanism. Because of the spread of railroads above the Ohio, linking the Western farmers with the industrial East, and the slavery question, the Democrats increasingly lost the Middle West. And the Democrats, with the rise of the Constitutional Party in the South, finally splintered into not two, but three groups.