THE STUBBORN SOIL
The fertile lands, delightful climate, and wonderful resources of Texas, all combine to attract within her borders the intelligent and enterprising of every State, and indeed of almost every land.
THE Vicksburg Times, 1870
Shall we gather at the river,
The beautiful, beautiful river;
Shall we gather at the river,
That flows by the throne of God.
TEXAS SETTLER HYMN
THE parameters of Texan life were set by the outcome of the Civil War; no restoration of 1874 could alter certain basic facts. Texas was subject to the revolutionized theory of government that destroyed all state sovereignty over politics, money, and social organization. The Industrial Revolution triumphed, turned the United States into a common market, and established economic development as the primary goal in American life. The cotton kingdom was aborted with much pain and blood; the cattle kingdom vanished because it never embraced enough people even to make a fight. Americans, like most peoples, accepted the inevitable as good. It would have been healthier for the nation, however, to have looked upon the contest for what it was, and to have recognized that while the greater and better organized population of the industrializing North could subordinate the South and Southwest, it did not effect for many years any solutions for the social and economic problems that made those regions different. Cotton and cattle were made tributary to the industrialized society, on its terms. The emergence of a new mercantile elite in the South, the building of rails, and the domination of Eastern finance did not industrialize Texas. These gave the state some new problems in exchange for old.
The wholly agrarian society in Texas was to suffer from severe problems and tensions in the last quarter of the 19th century. The greater nation dragged it along certain courses it did not want to go, and forced it to abide by laws and rules few Texans saw as working for their own best interests. There were continual prejudices and bitternesses on each side. Social and geographical factors slowed industrialization in Texas compared with the U.S. as a whole; meanwhile, the economy, oriented as much or more to Europe as to the North, suffered from enforced national tariffs and hard-money policies. Texans saw these impositions as a part of the pattern of conquest; Yankees looked on Texan protests as rebellion.
The agrarian problem—and most, if not the most powerful Americans, were agrarians in the 1870s—was consistently misunderstood or ignored by dominant government after the Civil War. Industrialism was an ideology, even if not well articulated. Once the United States adopted the Texan solution to the Indian problem consciously, and agreed to the reordering of the Negro tacitly, economics were to dominate Texas politics and federal–state relations. In these fields Texans were not to have their way.
For about two decades after the restoration of nominal state sovereignty, however, the agrarian society of Texas was successful. In these years the state developed enormously. The development, however, was like the previous Southern advance, along static lines. The two reasons for the great increase in over-all wealth and state revenues during the 1870s and early 1880s were, first, a heavy immigration, mostly from the South, and second, a cycle of wet or rainy years throughout even the central and western areas of the state.
Life in the 1870s was very little different for the average Texas farm family than it had been in 1860. The planters were gone, and the new landowners who took their place tended to live in towns, but the thousands of small farms throughout eastern and central Texas still raised cotton and corn, and were surrounded by a few cows, sheep, hogs, and noisy flocks of domestic fowl. The more industrious families had gardens now and a few fruit trees for home use. Corn was eaten or fed to the stock; cotton was sold for cash, needed for taxes and always desperately scarce. Much trading, even at the local settlement stores, was still by barter: bacon for denim, smoked hams for flour. Each fall hogs and beeves were killed, hides sold, and the meat cured. Game was still abundant in most regions of Texas, and venison, duck, squirrel, turkey, and quail supplemented every farmer family's diet.
Land was still plowed with oxen, seeds planted by hand. Husbands still made implements and furniture, wives clothing, soap, candles, and bedding. Spring or well water supplied each farm; logrollings, house-raisings, and quilting parties continued as they had for a hundred years. The school system, after the destruction of the Radical innovations, was the old, largely private, little red house system of old.
The countryside was overwhelmingly rural. Washington County, with the largest population of any county in Texas, had no important towns at all. But county seats and settlements were important centers; the farms radiated around them. The Texas farmer was still in no sense a peasant, affixed to his soil. He moved frequently, always seeking better land, and while the towns, in an era of limited transportation, were inhabited solely by business or professional classes, the farmers went in and out of them. They provided centers for communication, and such business as the farmer did.
A typical Texas town contained a courthouse, several general stores, at least one drugstore, and inevitably, a number of saloons. The general stores sold a limited number of goods: a few groceries, such as cured meats, sugar, syrup, cheese, coffee, crackers, dried fish and fruits. Canned goods could normally be found only in larger towns. Dry goods could always be bought, such as denim cloth, calico, gingham, and hats. Furniture or hardware was rarely sold; men made their own. Guns and ammunition always filled one counter; though the farm families almost always owned an old percussion rifle or shotgun—old "Tin and Tack"—handed down, and for which they manufactured their own shot.
Luxuries in this ragged South were few: peppermint stick candy at Christmas time, to make children's eyes grow wide; lemon crackers, and not much else.
The drugstore was as important, perhaps more so, than the general goods store. Patent medicines were plentiful, and guaranteed for almost any ill.
Despite glowing statements, and vehement denials, health conditions in much of eastern Texas, particularly near the Gulf, were not good. The actual incidence of the dread diseases, cholera, typhus, and yellow fever, is hard to determine, because Texas newspapers vigorously suppressed such news. However, in the early years of the Republic, cholera epidemics were frequent, at Goliad, Nacogdoches, Indianola, Brazoria, and San Antonio. Typhus, certainly brought in from Central Europe, ravaged the German settlements at New Braunfels and Fredericksburg in their formative years.
Cholera was combatted among the Spanish-Mexican population by the wearing of copper amulets, and by lime, laudanum, and boiled peyote water taken internally. Anglo-American cures such as large doses of brandy, cayenne pepper, and mustard were probably equally effective and euphoric. Almost all educated people, however, connected Asiatic cholera and filth, and by the 1870s actual epidemics were rare; a few outbreaks were still caused by polluted wells.
Yellow fever, with endemic malaria, caused havoc along the coasts. U.S. Army records are more informative than Texas newspapers, which printed little that might inhibit immigration. Some two thousand soldiers died of yellow jack at Fort Brown, with the worst outbreak coming in 1882. This hazard was not removed from the Gulf coast until these fevers were finally associated with mosquitoes.
For most assorted chills and fevers Texans took large amounts of quinine. Doctors prescribed quinine and calomel for most ills and advised against milk.
The numerous doctors in the state were generally poorly trained and educated, and their practice was hardly brilliant. No Texas doctor ascribed to the theory of germs in the 1870s, nor could any perform abdominal surgery or remove an inflamed appendix. Many frontier doctors served also as dentists; a medico who could set broken limbs while someone held the patient down could also pull teeth by the same method. One brilliant exception to the rule was Dr. Ferdinand Ludwig von Herff, who practiced distinguished medicine at San Antonio. Herff brought German medicine to Texas, used chloroform as early as 1854, and founded a medical dynasty that kept in touch
with Vienna.
The hotels in Texas, except in the larger towns like Galveston and San Antonio, hardly changed; they served up rough fare, well water, and common, vermin-infested beds. The saloon, however, had grown into a genuine Texas institution. It was a social and political center for a considerable part of the population. Heavy drinking seems to have been common, and in an armed society, particularly in the frontier regions, politics, strong drink, and strong opinions produced frequent gunfights. The saloons were already producing a certain reaction, however. The American temperance movement entered Texas in the 1840s, and it made considerable headway among the puritanical farmers. By the 1850s the question of alcohol had entered politics; under a local option law later found unconstitutional, thirty-five counties restricted the sale of liquor. Agitation to close the saloons was growing, but this was not yet a dominant force.
One great change in postwar Texas was the emergence of the churches. All historians seem to agree that they were the single most important cultural and social force behind the Texas frontier. The more institutionalized churches, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic, were among the first to build edifices, but these were mostly confined to the towns. They were influential, particularly the Presbyterian, but they did not have the effect on politics or life that the Methodists and rapidly growing Baptists did. Methodists and Baptists carried over the old Anglo-Celtic puritan ethic almost intact. Baptists recognized only the authority of the local congregation in matters of religion; they supported no other; and they could organize a church without authority or ordination. They were slow to erect church buildings, but by 1860 they already had 500 congregations in Texas. The Methodists were still a majority in 1870, but losing ground fast. These, and other evangelical bodies, enjoyed a rapid growth in Texas. By 1870, there were 843 churches, with some 200,000 members.
These fundamentalist congregations were evolved by the frontier; they met its conditions most perfectly; and they were saturated with the American frontier ethos. All were puritanical, sectarian, and enormously democratic; they were brotherhoods rather than institutionalized organizations. They bore very little resemblance to the urban Presbyterian, Anglican, or other churches. They filled a much larger void in rural life. The evangelical assemblies provided the frontier with its social cohesion; they were the only cultural and socializing agencies Anglo-Texas had.
Their puritanism, also, was not quite the same as that of the urban middle class. Frontierspeople never quite adopted the Victorian urban furor over sex. Texans were much too close to the soil. Conversely, they chose alcohol as a more violent battleground. But the puritan ethic had the same root, and therefore the same basic effect. It made both Texan farmer and Northern businessman utterly functional, and severely limited the cultural vision of each. Both saw work as the greatest virtue; both expected material success.
Church meetings were as much social as ideological. They were held in open groves or brush arbors. Here families came from miles around, dressed in Sunday best. They included suppers, bazaars, and basket parties; they lasted all day, with religious services in the morning and at night. There were two-hour sermons, delivered by circuit riders or local laymen; men and women listened from separate benches. Here women and girls, starved for companionship of their own kind, could grasp at news and gossip, and men discussed crops, common problems, and politics. This meeting was the only place large numbers of people ever assembled regularly on the harsh frontier. The enormous, socializing, tribal effect on thought and custom is easily understood. What was discussed, and thundered from the crude pulpits, set the moral standards and much of the thinking of farming Texans across the whole frontier.
Some of the preachers were cultivated men. The great majority were men of God called from the people, well-meaning but unlettered, who understood their people and the essential evils to which all flesh was heir. This was a cruel, hard, atomistic place, where great wrongs were done and received. The preachers tried to battle the world and the devil; they thundered against sins of every kind. They did not regularly prevail; nor was it possible for any clergy, in this or any other time or place, to alter the facts of human nature or be substantially different from their own people in thought and deed. The preachers were sometimes harsh, stubborn, intemperate, intolerant, like their flocks; but they made the pulpit the center of their world, and they probably left the world a bit better than they found it.
The frontiersmen were Old Testament–oriented. The land they lived in had many parallels with the land of Canaan, and they themselves with the children of Israel. They were beset with dangerous heathen enemies. The land was scourged by ravaging insects and burning drouth; the imagery of the Israelite deserts struck home in the Texan heart. The farmer endured plagues of grasshoppers; he lost sheep and cows to cats and wolves; he saw green crops die and wells run dry. The Old Testament had a relevance it would have for no later American generations.
The lives of the farmers hung on acts of God, who made rain fall from the heavens and the rivers swell. Their best-loved hymns, with which they made the arbors shake, sang of cool and beautiful rivers they would someday cross, and of glorious showers of blessing upon the land. These people, especially near the 98th meridian, were locked in gigantic battle against Nature's God and their own weaknesses; like Israelites, they chose this soil; like Israelites they had to fight for it, with faith. They developed an Israelite chauvinism and intolerance, which sometimes gave them callous cruelty, but with it, a Hebrew strength.
Fresh immigration swelled the tribes; families filling up the land tended to be absorbed quickly. The scattered, lonely life, with its barren society centered on the meetings, permitted few enclaves, integrating all.
The true cities were still small. Galveston, enjoying a flush of seacoast prosperity, had temporarily become the largest settlement in the state. It had about 14,000 inhabitants in 1870, and 22,000 ten years later. It was briefly beautiful, with six public squares, two parks, two miles of esplanade, street railways drawn by horses, thirteen hotels, three concert halls, and an opera house. Half of the cotton grown in Texas was exported; it went through Galveston, and the profits erected splendid mansions and financed insurance companies and banks. Galveston, unique in Texas, had 23 stock companies, with capital exceeding $12,000,000. It was a seacoast, Southern city, with gaslights and theaters; on its island it was remote from the earthy heartland.
San Antonio, like Galveston outside the body of rural Anglo-Texas, was only slightly smaller, with 12,000 persons in 1870. The Spanish-Mexicans were outnumbered by the Germans, though the Spanish had given a certain character to the town. San Antonio had become an important military center, headquarters for all Army troops in Texas, and this function it was never to lose. The military, the Europeans, and the Spanish all brought a peculiar cosmopolitanism, which in the 1870s began to be submerged. The rails first reached the city then, and they brought in an influx of Anglo-Americans for the first time. In these years, also, San Antonio became a headquarters for prominent ranchers from the south and southwest, who fled the arid brasada as the Spaniards had. It became a mecca and retiring place for prominent Texans from all parts of the state. Here Rip Ford, other Ranger captains, Confederate generals, past governors, and big cattlemen from the Rio Grande met at the Menger or on the plaza and made talk.
Houston, with nine thousand people, was third in size. It was not yet a port; it lay fifty miles inland up Buffalo Bayou. But it was an important rail and steamboat terminus, and already had begun to make such things as steam engines, rail cars, wagons, cigars, and soap. It had twelve sawmills, for the vast timberlands of east Texas, with seemingly endless stands of pine and cypress, were coming into their own. Out of this ravaging, Houston steamed and prospered.
Austin, the capital finally confirmed to it in 1872, now had its rail line, and reached five thousand. It was an attractive town, overlooking the wide channel of the Colorado, set in rolling hills. It lived primarily off the government; it was orderl
y and clean.
The next largest center in Texas was an ephemeral boomtown, Jefferson. In the far north, on Cypress Bayou, Jefferson counted four thousand souls. It had sixty brick stores, built in a single year, an ice plant, a brewery, gaslights, and all-night trade. But the rails pushed on through east Texas, and in the 1870s Jefferson began to fade.
In these years Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso were all small frontier towns. Waco, on the Brazos, was larger. But the people of the state were now rapidly pushing west. The last great tide of immigration into Texas had arrived.
In bringing this immigration a number of factors converged. The first was the dilemma of the planters, and their successors in the ownership of the land, in finding labor. The landed groups in the older parts of Texas all tried to find new people to replace the newly freed, and temporarily euphoric, slaves.
One landowner, in an unsigned piece in the Texas Almanac of 1870 wrote prophetically: "Competition will dissipate many of the freedmen's conceited notions and lower their growing pretensiousness." Having learned nothing from the Negro problem in the South, this same writer urged the importation of Chinese. Although a few Chinese were brought in, they proved too clever to work on the farms. Some worked for railroads, others as cow-camp cooks. As soon as they could, most became small merchants in the cities. Much more successful were the efforts to get ruined whites from the older South to move to Texas.
Committees met in various places, agreed to transmit favorable information about the state, above all, concerning the healthful climate, the richness of the soils, and the availability of unused lands. Southern newspapers agreeably printed such intelligence as landowners in Texas supplied.
The state government also widely encouraged immigration, which was felt essential to strengthen the Indian-riddled western frontier. The state had two ends: to settle white labor, as tenants, on the idle cotton plantations in the east; and to encourage homesteading on the far frontier. A homestead act, similar to the federal law of 1862, was passed, and also a law exempting 200 acres of homestead land from foreclosure for debt. These state laws were unusual, and since approximately half the state was still unsettled by whites, seemed to offer enormous opportunities. Besides open lands in the west, there was an abundance of slave-deserted plantation acres, and very cheap acreage all through the farm-line counties on the edge of the Great Plains. Articles were printed all over the South that a family head needed "no money to secure him a good farm in almost any part of Texas"; all a man needed was "good character, industrious habits, and one or two boys. . ."
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