Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  All thirteen opposition party senators were arrested and detained. This broke the tie—but someone noticed the state senate now lacked a quorum. Four of the detained men were released and hustled to the capitol to solve the problem. One of these officers was expelled shortly afterward for "resisting arrest."

  The remaining Conservative and Democratic officeholders were kept under house arrest for three weeks. During this time, the entire package of Radical legislation was rushed through.

  A. J. Hamilton, E. M. Pease, and James W. Throckmorton joined in a joint appeal to the Congress to restore Texans the civil rights guaranteed under the Federal Constitution. Discredit was thrown upon their loyalty to the nation, and the appeal was not acted upon.

  The years of Carpetbagger rule were gaudy, violent, sometimes comic in retrospect, but always tragic at the time. The national view towards the era wavers with whatever view toward the American Negro minority happens to be fashionable at any given time. The regime was founded on Union bayonets and Negro votes, but evidence is small that it did either the Union or the unfortunate minority any good. Negroes put the Carpetbaggers in the state house, but with rare exceptions the ragged horde did not share the wealth.

  A large number of men who were indisputably honorable actively supported this sort of rule in Texas and other states. Probably, wrapped in their own drives and biases, honorable men in the U.S. Government simply failed to see the folly of permitting the domestic wreckage in Texas. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in most respects was as blind to the cruelty, injustice, and folly committed in the name of the Reconstruction of the South as contemporary English governments were blind to the cruelties and follies of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.

  The period was a weird melange of corruption and genuine social reform. Negro suffrage—combined with white disenfranchisement and wholesale fraud—produced a political revolution. Meanwhile, social and economic revolutions went on. A few years after the war, the "bottom rail was on the top," as Texans said.

  Corruption was most evident in the printing and railroad bills. Davis appointed some 10,000 men to valuable offices and made the fortunes of many, but this was essentially legitimate patronage. So were the enormous increases in salary the legislators voted officeholders, and their own increase in per diem. The new governing class were poor men, without a touch of aristocratic ideal or ethic. They possessed an enormous middle-class grasp for money, and they voted themselves a raise. This was characteristic and inevitable; it would happen again. The real corruption, however, came with the $200,000 the printing bill gave the administration to spend. Radical news sheets sprouted in the state like noxious weeds.

  Railroad legislation provided similar windfalls. The legislature voted the International Railroad Company twenty sections of land for each mile of track and tax exemption for twenty-five years. Similar grants were provided the Southern Transcontinental and Southern Pacific. In credit to Edmund Davis, these acts were passed over his veto, and his veto stopped several other similar bills. At the same time the state gave away its lands, enabling acts of the legislature allowed cities to vote large railroad and other bonds, totaling more than $1,000,000. These acts were in contradiction to the constitution of 1869.

  In their defense, proponents of railroad legislation could point to more than 1,000 miles of new track.

  Opponents saw resources of the state—more than required to subsidize the tracks—handed to corporate interests, which profited enormously. They saw a huge increase in taxes and bonded debt, which went to pay for the liberality the Radicals bestowed. Most of all, they saw legislators who had never had a dime sprouting gold watches and gold-headed canes, building or buying fine mansion houses, and driving English carriages behind blooded horses. The railroad boys and other lobbyists did spread a bit of their windfalls around.

  Much Radical legislation could stand the inspection of time. The Carpetbaggers tried to build a state road system, though they never progressed beyond levying taxes to support it. They passed a homestead exemption law by which no homestead of 200 acres or less could be seized for debt, except a direct mortgage. The state school acts of 1870 and 1871 created a genuine free public school system for the first time, adequately supported by taxation. In requiring compulsory attendance of children between six and eighteen, without regard to race, the legislature was fifty years ahead of the age. In its centralization, with a state superintendent, state board of education, and 35 district supervisors, who appointed local school boards and thus removed control of education completely from the public, the Radicals were more than a century in advance of America.

  Even the good things were intensely unpopular, because the regime itself was universally held in contempt.

  The corruption and extravagances of the Carpetbaggers, which reflected the worst of Anglo-American politics, have been easily seen. The rise of a new mercantile and landowning class with them in Texas has not been so clearly marked. The almost complete destruction of the old planter gentry, not by the war but in its aftermath, escaped attention. But it is a truism, if not universally true, that few families that had wealth or station prior to 1860 survived the following two decades with either.

  The war bankrupted the planter class by destroying its capital in money and slaves. The principal assets of the planters had always been invested in Negroes; they vanished on Juneteenth. The planters still held land, but they were unable to hold it long. Without labor, they could not put it back in production. And for several critical years the labor situation in Texas—and the whole South—remained in turmoil. The stabilization of 1866 could have saved many planters, but it was overturned. The freedmen once again came to believe they would be cared for by the Government; the Radicals made promises, though they were not kept. Millions of acres were freely granted for the development of rail lines; hardly a dollar and not an acre went to former slaves.

  By even the most optimistic evidence, neither Negro nor plantation owner ever adjusted adequately to day or contract labor. Even allowing for white prejudices, historians have shown that this kind of freedman labor was inefficient. It did not work, and proud plantations grew up in weeds.

  Another disaster, quite beyond control, was that the price of cotton—the only possible cash crop—fell. Cotton sold for thirty cents a pound in 1866; it had dropped to seventeen in 1870, and thirteen five years later. This savaged the small farmer in the uplands. It put the planter out of business.

  Under these pressures, land values collapsed. Land fell to a tenth of the 1860 price in some regions; throughout the state there was a general loss averaging 80 percent. The planters' acres became worthless. If they were mortgaged, they became a genuine liability. Mortgage sales were universal. East Texas records in these years show an almost complete turnover in ownership of land.

  This pressure came in an era of relatively high taxes, imposed by a prodigal state government. Planters, in agonizing case after case, simply could not raise the cash. Taxes had to be paid in hard money; everything else could be paid in kind. They lost their estates.

  Much harder to measure than the effects of falling cotton and land prices and the scarcity of money in east Texas was the immense psychic damage done the planters. They had been vigorous enough, but by 1860 too many of them had climbed part way up the ladder of aristocratic illusion. They had removed themselves, and above all, their children, from the idea of economic competition. In the terrible debacle of 1865, planters, like most aristocrats, lacked the resilience to withstand humiliation; they did not know how to go back to making money, and most disdained such grubbing. They could no longer swim in the dirty stream that most Americans and all Southerners had to breast. They sank out of sight.

  Here ended that abortive culture in Texas, the cotton kingdom.

  The lands and houses of the former gentry did not disappear. In logical fashion, new families arose, but with several immense differences. The new men came from mercantile, middle-class origins; they were shrewd, tough, energetic, cynical, and
generally lacking in public spirit. They despised both the languor and the airs of the planter class. This class grew up out of increasing business in the towns from the Sabine to Dallas in the West as tracks and roads went in. It was better fitted to a sweaty, gaudy, gaslight America, and looked back on the Grecian era with contempt. It built cotton gins and warehouses, and bought up bottomlands at two dollars per acre; in central Texas some lands sold for sixty cents. These new Texans were mercantile rather than industrial, but they strongly resembled the rising Yankee industrial upper class. Their entire orientation was economic. They began to produce the same alienation toward culture that industrialism produced in the North.

  These new owners discovered the sharecrop solution to Negro labor and stabilized the South. They lived with most of the old trappings of Southern gentry, surrounded by Negro servants. But they developed no real ethic, nor did they attempt to become aristocrats. They were sometimes called Bourbons, and they were flamboyant and tasteless as planters never were. They peopled Faulkner's novels.

  The term "planter" survived in other states, but in Texas the name almost entirely disappeared.

  During the breakup of the plantation system, the corn farmers in the interior were little disturbed by these changing social conditions. For some years their own condition did not much change. In central-west Texas the Indian problem was paramount, because the Army rendered almost no protection at this time. In fact, when it was discovered that cotton would grow well beyond the mucky alluvial soils, the new cash crop exploded westward to the Dallas-Sherman line, and farmer prosperity temporarily increased. There was a large increase in new small farms.

  Noticeably, there was more resistance to the new regime in the western-central counties than in the east. Too much of the morale of plantation Texas had been shot away. But the western borderlands were armed, accustomed to violence, and surly. Cultural diffusion made these Texans as Yankee-hating, and more Negro-despising than, those of the bottomlands and piney woods.

  The first opposition to the Davis crowd was carried almost entirely by Conservative Republicans; Democrats were still too cowed. Conservative papers protested the new acts of the legislature, while Conservative legislators, when not under house arrest, orated violently on the floor. Editorial after editorial was hurled against the horrendous corruption of officials, the open sale of votes to railroad and bond lobbies, and the repressive police acts.

  Significantly, Morgan Hamilton, Radical U.S. Senator, was scandalized by his own colleagues. Morgan Hamilton was an idealist; he believed in Radical social and governmental reforms, and the habilitation of the Negro. But he attacked the unconstitutional extension of terms of office, the Militia Bill, and the State Police law. He said openly these were violations of the Party's pledges; he also said the Radicals were honor-bound to support the same liberal principles advocated by his Conservative brother, Jack.

  Davis and company soon got a bellyful of Morgan Hamilton, as one Carpetbagger put it. On a manufactured technicality, the legislature declared his election as U.S. Senator invalid; it then chose General J. J. Reynolds in his place, although it was brought out on the floor of the state senate that Reynolds was not a Texas citizen or even a legal resident of the state. At this time Reynolds, a brevet major general, held the rank of colonel in the regular U.S. Cavalry at San Antonio. Governor Davis wired the General congratulations, and Reynolds graciously accepted.

  Ironically, all twelve votes cast for Hamilton in the Texas legislature were by Democrats. This honor to Reynolds, a man almost all Texans believed had injured and humiliated them, caused general outrage. More important, it seems to have at last turned Senator Charles Sumner's stomach.

  It was widely expected that President Grant would use his influence to have Reynolds seated. Reynolds did proceed to Washington on the President's order. The Senate refused to seat him; the judiciary committee determined that Hamilton was entitled to his full term. It was a sign in the wind that the Civil War was ending in the North.

  But the war was entering its most bitter phase in Texas. At the heart of the conflict were the Militia Bill and the State Police. An odor clung to Davis's implementation of both, and on this all historians, North and South, Democrat and Republican, have agreed.

  The first mass resistance to the Carpetbaggers began in the summer of 1871. It was spurred by the unprecedented taxation that was now being imposed. The moves were orderly and constitutional. E. M. Pease, George Hancock, and Morgan Hamilton, all Republicans, sponsored taxpayers' meetings across the state. A mass gathering of Texas taxpayers was finally held in Austin in September; it was attended by united Republicans and Democrats from 94 counties. Major George B. Erath, an early Austrian immigrant who had become prominent in Texas, held the chair.

  E. M. Pease addressed the convention. He attacked the disastrous financial and fiscal policies of the Carpetbaggers, as the state administration was now called, and pointed out that when Davis took office there had been a healthy surplus in the treasury. But by 1871 the state was not only bankrupt and borrowing heavily, "the warrants of the State are hawked about the streets of Austin at six bits on the dollar, and sold with difficulty." Six million dollars were to be levied in state taxes, against an estimated $800,000 actually needed to run the state.

  Seven members of the taxpayers committee tried to meet with the governor to discuss cutting expenditures. Davis refused to see them. Balked, the committee prepared a series of honest and authoritative reports, signed by both Democrats and Republicans. These reports to the people were factual—and appalling.

  The tax rate had risen in two years from fifteen cents on $100 property valuation to $2.175, not including occupation taxes, city taxes, the $2 annual poll tax, or the levies to retire railroad bonds voted by the legislature. The railroad levies alone amounted to another sixty cents per $100.

  Approximately 21 percent of Texans' total income went for taxes. This would have been extraordinary in the 19th century, but supportable if the taxes were evenly applied. But they were not. They fell almost completely on property holders, and even then were levied with great injustice. Planters and farmers were being ruined; businessmen generally escaped. There was no income tax.

  The reports indicated also that $695,000, rather than $6,000,000, would adequately if austerely support the state government. The convention was angry over the uses for which the money was being spent. Even the school taxes were attacked, because the school system created a bureaucratic hierarchy and denied local taxpayers all voice in its administration.

  The convention then demanded that elections be held in 1871, as required by the constitution of 1869, despite the legislature's setting this aside. If elections were not held, Pease and the others suggested a "taxpayers' revolt." They did not advocate mob action, but suggested that injunctions and court action be instituted and fought in every county, while payments were held up.

  Davis reacted characteristically to the orderly meeting in Austin. He had Radical leaders assemble a huge crowd of singing, turbulent Negroes in Austin; he marched at their head through the streets to the Capitol. At the Capitol steps, Davis addressed the throng.

  "The temple of freedom is being defiled by taxpayers!" he roared to the assembled Negroes. "It is up to you, my colored brethren, to purify the place!" At the Governor's command, the mob formed in double ranks. "March around the building singing those glorious hymns of freedom, with which you all are so familiar."

  An Austin newspaper printed these remarks, and also the events of the next few hours: "Thereupon, this squad . . . the most ignorant, superstitious, and servile representatives of the race . . . marched around the building, at the hour of midnight, singing 'John Brown's Soul is Marching On,' and 'Rally Round the Flag, Boys.'"

  A number of papers were "aghast that such rabble was countenanced by the Governor of the State of Texas."

  The capitol was thus purified, but the taxpayers' revolt prevailed. It forced Davis to call for elections in 1871, rather than wait a yea
r as scheduled by the Davis law of 1870.

  It was apparent that Conservative Republicans and Democrats were ceasing to fight the war and were fusing against the Carpetbaggers. At Seguin, east of San Antonio, a great fusion rally was held. Ex-Confederate officers and staunch Unionists who had not spoken to each other for years now solemnly shook hands. Radical leaders rode to Austin, expressing fright. Davis himself was worried. He now issued an election order to the state Adjutant General: all peace officers, militia, and State Guard personnel were to conduct the polls, and police the "conduct of the people." He threatened to declare martial law, under the Militia Bill, in any county where disorder prevailed. In effect, Union soldiers were to be replaced in this election by Davis police.

  The effect of this order was explosive. Conservative Republican newspapers printed denunciations: "It is impossible for us to express the indignation which it has aroused. . . . Governor Davis and his satraps may learn to their cost, that the People of Texas cannot and will not always submit to their arbitrary usurpations and tyrannical acts!"

  Ex-Governor A. J. Hamilton openly campaigned for the Democrats. Almost all the moderate and conservative native Unionists deserted with him. Two enormously influential newspapers, which suddenly found plenty of funds, began to print Democratic news and doctrines. The San Antonio Herald and Austin Democratic Statesman overcame the advantage Davis had enjoyed through the Printing Act and his controlled press.

  Meanwhile, the Carpetbagger group—"Davis' plunderers and officeholders, the Morgan Hamilton honest faction, and the railroad-bought boys"—were angry and quarreling among themselves. Democrats and Conservative Republicans had only one real fear, that they would be defrauded again.