Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Abraham Lincoln's profession of malice toward none appalled the majority of his political associates. To eschew the winy fruits of total victory after a crusade that left 300,000 Union dead required more humanity and folk wisdom than most Americans possessed. Probably, had he lived, Lincoln would have prevailed. His advisers disagreed with his live-and-let-live policy toward the South, but they had disagreed with almost every decision he had made during the war. It was certainly a relief to many in the government when fate presented them with a dead martyr rather than a live, folk-hero President, whose people might not really understand his pragmatism but loved him all the same. Booth's bullet was more disastrous to Texas than Brutus' dagger had been for Rome.

  Andrew Johnson, the poor-boy Tennesseean who became an accidental President in 1865, was a national disaster of another kind. Johnson, a Southerner and a Democrat—the usual compromise candidate for the Vice-Presidency—understood and completely sympathized with Lincoln's views. But Johnson, holding the powers his chief had made enormous, lacked support in the dominant Republican Party and thus any real political base. Nor was he a hero to the Northern masses; Lincoln's lost magic could not be transferred. Finally, Johnson was well-meaning but tactless, stubborn, and inept. In this first address to a Congress still smarting from its chivvying by Lincoln he said: "Your President is now the Tribune of the people, and thank God I am, and intend to assert the power which the people have placed in me."

  Johnson not only was tactless and espoused an unpopular policy toward the late Confederacy, but he opposed the bulk of the domestic legislation of the Republican Party, on taxes, railroads, monetary policy, and states' rights. President and Congress were on a collision course.

  Very little of this was seen by the native leaders in the paralyzed South, not even by Jack Hamilton, who worked to put things back together on Johnson's terms. The first step was to hold elections for a constitutional convention, which assembled on February 7, 1866. In this group were both old Unionists, such as John Hancock and Edward Degener, and one-time Secessionists, H. R. Runnels and Oran Roberts. The Blue faced the Gray. The majority of delegates, however, were conservatives of both factions. They chose as their leader General James Throckmorton, C.S.A. The old Whig, who had spent his political life fighting for what he believed best for Texas at the time, was now respected in both camps.

  The convention quickly proposed several amendments to the state constitution of 1845, abolishing slavery, nullifying the secession ordinance, renouncing the future right of secession, and repudiating not only Confederate, but actually all state wartime debts. Civil laws unconnected with the war or Confederacy were approved. No real controversy arose in these fields.

  A more troubling problem was the question of the new civil status of the former slaves. This was a problem the North, for all its commitment to freedom and pressure toward equality, never really understood or faced in the 19th century. Its own Negro population was minuscule. There was complete agreement in Texas that slavery was dead. But it was politically impossible for Texans to consider giving the freedmen full citizen rights. The remembrance of slavery was one factor, but the actual class status of the blacks was equally, or more, important. The horde of Negroes, through no fault of their own, were impoverished, illiterate, and unskilled. They were a bottom group, the lowest of the low, who had never participated in society or government. If Dr. W. E. B. DuBois later wrote that in 1861 not one white American in a hundred believed that Negroes could ever become an integral part of American democracy, the percentage in Texas was probably just as high in 1866.

  The men sitting at Austin would have been dubious of giving rights to an equivalent horde of poor whites. However, there was another factor, which tended to be deprecated, denied, ignored, or obscured. This was the prevalent and entirely characteristic feeling of racial superiority common to all Northern European peoples. The educated and higher social classes in Texas took it for granted that the Negro was inherently inferior to the white; they could justify it by the Negro present and Negro past if forced to articulate. To whites lower in the social scale, it was not only a matter of truth but an article of faith.

  In the retrospect of history it is not easy to offer simplistic criticism of Throckmorton, Pease, Hancock, Hamilton, and other capable men who struggled with the problem of Negro status. The Negroes were thoroughly differentiated both by color and by culture. It had taken the bloodiest conflict in modern times to make the Negroes free; it would have taken a social cataclysm of the most immense proportions to give the Negroes equality. In all times and in all places there were only three ways by which greatly differentiated peoples had lived together: as slave or serf and master; by miscegenation; or by some system of caste. The first and the last solutions, historically, were commonest; they had been employed from the New World to India. The Spanish, in America, had imposed a combination of the two, with considerable miscegenation on the side.

  The new Texas constitution ignored the Thirteenth Amendment, which freed the slaves but also carried definite connotations of Negro equality. Freedmen were recognized as having status at law, with the right to hold private property. They had rights before a jury, with one exception: no Negro could testify in court in cases involving whites. They were specifically denied the right to vote.

  John Reagan, who had been Postmaster General of the Confederacy and who had recently returned from detention in the North, repeatedly warned the convention that the state should make some token step toward Negro suffrage, such as giving the ballot to freedmen who could read and write. Reagan wrote that the North was in an ugly mood, and there was much sentiment for Negro equality; a little compromise could turn away much wrath. Texans treated this view with derision.

  They had reason to. In 1866 Negro equality was by no means a Northern commitment. The evidence that it was not abounded. The Union army had included 200,000 Negro soldiers, who received unequal pay, allowances, and promotion. The Yankee army displayed continual overt evidences of discrimination and even hatred for the Negro throughout the war, as letters and diaries attest. In the occupation forces, Texans had seen ample evidence of a sneering, patronizing attitude toward former slaves. Lincoln himself had told a delegation of black leaders in the White House: "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for your free colored people to remain with us. . . . When you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. . . . I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact. . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated."

  More concrete, throughout the war there had been riots directed against Negroes in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and New York. The majority of Western states had passed laws prohibiting Negroes from settling, or attending white schools. Only five states permitted Negro suffrage. In 1865 Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Connecticut voted down referenda giving Negroes the ballot; the Nebraska constitution of 1866 limited voting to whites. Four major Northern states were to pass similar legislation within two years. On February 5, 1866, Senator Charles Sumner stated in Congress that educational qualifications should be imposed on Negro voting. Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, wrote that colored voting must be limited to those who could read and write, paid taxes, and were established in a craft or trade. Sumner and Greeley were known as Negro champions. The Presidential recommendation to the South requested that, at the least, any franchise be limited by literacy qualifications.

  Few Texans, other than John H. Reagan, realized that the North was rapidly moving toward a double standard of enforcing Negro equality both as a political and a punitive measure. Nowhere, probably, was this to be better expressed than in Thaddeus Stevens's equation of slave-owning with sin, with a required expiation by the humiliation of Negro equality, not ignoring the "Party purpose."

  The proposals of the Texas convention were submitted to the public in June 1866, as amendments to the state constitution along with the general election of state officers.


  The governor's race narrowed to Throckmorton and E. M. Pease. Both men were Unionists and moderate conservatives, although Pease was a little more radical. Under military government, only a Unionist of some stripe could take full part in political affairs. The two men did not differ essentially on issues. Throckmorton was opposed to any form of Negro suffrage, but upheld the Presidential Reconstruction program in all respects. Pease agreed personally on the issue, but thought expediency required literate Negro voting.

  In this campaign, however, an explosive cleavage split the Unionist, or Republican, Party in two. It did not center so much around ways and means but was a conflict in basic goals. The Republican-Unionist camp now began breaking visibly apart in two soon-to-be-hostile groups.

  The first faction was the largest. These were the Throckmorton-Hamilton men, called the Conservatives. The Conservatives had opposed secession, but they were now dead-set against further fighting of the Civil War. They wanted no punitive measures to be employed against former Confederates. Their avowed purpose was to return Texas to the Union as a free state as quickly as possible. They included a strong dash of Whiggery from old times, and had the support of many planters. The Conservatives had no quarrel with the old social order, and they did not greatly worry if local Democrats returned to power.

  The second, minority faction of Republicans were the Radicals. They consisted basically of two kinds of men: turncoat Texans and extreme Unionists. The Radicals advocated a number of drastic measures: disenfranchisement of all ex-Confederates, Negro suffrage, and the splitting of Texas into several states. Among the turncoats there was a high percentage of ne'er-do-wells and misfits, as well as a great many people from the lower levels of the social structure divided between genuine radicals and men out for gain. The extreme Unionists included many Northerners who had arrived in the state. As the Texas historian Nunn wrote, there were few idealists among them; some wanted to change the South, but most came to see what fortune held. All Radicals were scandalized at the prospect of Texas being returned to the hands of the old regime. What they proposed, in the name of union and patriotism, was a complete overturn and the imposition of Negro rule. They, of course, in alliance with the Republican powers in the North, would control the rulers.

  Both wings were almost unanimously regarded by Texans as traitors to the state.

  Throckmorton won in a free election, 49,277 to 12,168. The amendments to the state constitution were approved by a much lesser margin.

  In August, James Throckmorton was inaugurated in the governorship, and the eleventh state legislature convened. The legislature was dominated by Conservative Republicans and Democrats, who were allied on almost everything except past history. On August 20, 1866, President Johnson declared the rebellion in Texas at an end. Ostensibly, the state was now prepared to reenter the Union.

  It was completely logical that the new legislature and administration wanted to reconstruct Texas in its old image; they had no valid internal reason for doing otherwise. They began to do so, certainly with the approval of the vast majority of voters in the state. Texans generally believed that their house was cleansed, and readmittance could not be far behind.

  The old South began to emerge at Austin in impoverished but still regal form. The legislature, in a gracious gesture, elected David G. Burnet, past President but also past Unionist, to the U.S. Senate; like Throckmorton, Burnet had Union views but had remained to serve his state. The other Senator, however, was Oran Roberts, who sparked the 1861 Secession convention.

  All of the three Congressmen sent to Washington were ex-Confederates.

  All of them, with the two senators, were rejected. None could take the "ironclad oath" now required by the Radical Republican–dominated Congress—that they had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States or supported any "pretended" government hostile or inimical thereto. This oath, of course, barred virtually all of the leadership of Texas from ever serving in Washington. Its purpose was "patriotic" but the skeletal fingers of political policy were beginning to show through. The Congress wanted no representative Southerners seated and voting.

  This was a grim warning, but Throckmorton proceeded onward, with that keen sense of legality that had sustained him all his life. He had survived Secession, the war, and Presidential Reconstruction, but now his adherence to the United States Constitution was finally his undoing.

  Throckmorton advised the legislature not to act on the Thirteenth Amendment, because it aroused antipathies in Texas better left buried, and it was totally unnecessary anyway. Enough states had already ratified it to make it the law of the land; there was no Constitutional requirement that an amendment had to be made unanimous.

  With his approval, the legislature overwhelmingly rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed freedmen extended civil rights. This amendment had first appeared in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which passed over Johnson's veto, then had been questioned on constitutional grounds. Not to be denied, the Congressional majority submitted it as an Amendment to the states. It did not include the right of franchise, and gained important support, above all in states where no Negroes were found. In the South, only Tennessee ever accepted it.

  Then, the eleventh legislature passed a series of so-called black codes. These regulated Negro affairs, and in Texas they were never so stringent as similar laws erected concurrently in other states of the old Confederacy. They were not planned to punish the Negro, but to put him back to work. All through east Texas plantations were being overgrown with weeds, while thousands of Negroes still congregated around Freedmen's Bureau offices hoping for acreage and mules. The attempted system of hiring Negroes by the day, or by contract, as labor was often hired in the North, had not worked. There were two immense problems. The former slaves delighted in taking no orders, a perfectly human reaction after years of forced labor; and the planters were bankrupt in money terms. They had no U.S. greenbacks with which to pay.

  The new labor laws, which were never termed Negro legislation, covered vagrancy, apprenticeship, labor contracts, and enticement of workers. They required "vagrants" to be usefully employed, and forbade them to leave employment through enticement to another job. Provisions included a prohibition of leaving the place of work without permission or having visitors during working hours; one clause required workers to be "obedient and respectful." The effect of such codes was obvious: they put the former slave back on the plantation, under a form of peonage. Some such, though probably less offensive, strictures were absolutely required; the Congress, which was in these years subsidizing railroads with millions and giving them millions more acres in land, refused to accept any responsibility for freedmen welfare. This led more than one member of the old slaveholding class to suspect the Northern goal was more to destroy the power of the obstructionist Southern planters than to raise the Negro in American life.

  The passage of such laws, however, waved a red flag before Northern champions of black rights. The slavocracy was rising again; today it regulated Texas; tomorrow there would be a solid phalanx of "Southern gentlemen" in Washington, arrogantly obstructing the Industrial Revolution once more. Both idealistic and humanitarian feelings for the freedmen and political fright seethed through many parts of the North.

  Throckmorton, meanwhile, tried both to have the Federal occupation incubus moved into the Western forts and out of the state. But the Army did not go; Congress did not want it to go. The military officers, despite the reestablishment of civil law and the fact that the President had declared the rebellion ended, still held to their courts-martial. Civil supremacy at law was still denied, nor could any soldier be tried before local courts. Throckmorton now had the Federal Constitution on his side and felt secure. But in the weird morass of post–Civil War politics into which America was sinking, the Constitution was a badly tattered banner. More important was the fact that in Washington the President and Radical Congress were staging a war. Each day Johnson lost power and prestige. No Army officer with an ounce o
f brains obeyed a Presidential order. Meanwhile, Governor Throckmorton made himself an enormous nuisance by standing righteously before the occupation authority. Sometimes he had to appeal to the head of the Freedman's Bureau to get some editor who criticized the Yankee presence in print out of jail.

  General Charles Griffin, commanding in Texas, was deeply offended by the Governor on one occasion. On a recommendation by the Freedmen's Bureau, he requested Throckmorton to release 227 Negro convicts from the penitentiary at Huntsville. A Bureau official, passing through, had interviewed this group and decided their offenses were all trivial. He did not investigate. Throckmorton gave this unprecedented request the reply it deserved. Griffin never forgave the 'Reb General."

  Under these circumstances the Texas governor found it almost impossible to restore law and order to the state. Through 1866, more and more areas were beginning to succumb to a sort of anarchy. Local sheriffs had little power; the Austin government had almost none at all.

  Meanwhile, a Radical press and Radical leaders in Texas kept the governor under continuous fire. Throckmorton was accused of disloyalty, treason, and plotting to run all good Union men out of the state. Radicals filled letters to Washington about Unionists being insulted on the streets. The "bloody shirt" of the Negro—and in these months more than a few blacks were beaten or murdered by Texas mobs—was energetically waved.