The military post in San Antonio provided a solid economic base and a level of prosperity that was often missing in frontier towns. Goods from Matagorda Bay 150 miles away found their first trading depot in this unusual place. The town bustled with government mule trains, express wagons, and innumerable ox carts hauling all manner of goods in and out. To the casual observer or unabashed optimist, San Antonio looked like a great place to be. In reality, life in southwestern Texas in the middle of the century was hard, primitive, and dangerous. Street fights were a regular occurrence and hardly a week went by without the report of a murder or shooting.7 This was not the Kentucky wilderness that Richard Clough Anderson and his wealthy Virginia gentleman peers had tamed and molded into a bucolic paradise of small farms and middling plantations. It certainly was not the tidy little metropolis of Dayton that Eliza’s Patterson ancestors had hacked out of a virgin forest.
Despite these challenges, Anderson was determined to create his idealized version of a country estate and leveraged his military connections to build it. The site he chose was one of the most picturesque in the area. Perched on the highest point of land about four miles north of town and nourished by natural springs at the headwaters of the San Antonio River stood a half-finished armory. It had been abandoned by the army and remained standing like a medieval ruin, an eyesore to the citizens of San Antonio. Anderson purchased the property and began transforming it into a ranchero mansion. The building had potential. Laid out in the shape of a Maltese cross, with thick stone walls and lofty ceilings, the home was cool in the summer and cozy in the winter. Anderson relished the opportunity to turn this rough diamond into a sparkling jewel, though it was a mere shell needing flooring, plaster, and decorative accoutrements. Anderson poured his considerable energies and money into the project. He intended to create a showplace. He imagined that it might become one of the finest new residences in Texas.8
Anderson brought horses and cattle with extensive pedigrees to his new ranch. They contrasted sharply with the longhorns and Indian palominos prevalent in the region. He branded the bovines with a moon and star. He gave his stallions biblical names like Jehoshaphat and Nebuchadnezzar. He eschewed the black coat and collar typical of his gentlemen peers, preferring instead the traditional vaquero outfit of chaps and a broad-brimmed sombrero. Like a character in one of his favorite Shakespeare plays, Anderson immersed himself in his own period drama. It soon became a horror story. When slave traders began to land their illegal cargo at Indianola and Galveston in blatant defiance of Texas and U.S. laws, Anderson resolved to take action. He would not stand idle and watch his country disintegrate. Despite having no political capital in Texas, he was still a man of talent and influence. Sam Houston and the Union circle in Texas needed him.9
Anderson decided to raise a company of “new Texas Rangers” to “cut the throat of every pirate aboard, scuttle their ships,” and free the slaves. He had two secret accomplices but needed a third. He chose a close neighbor whom he suspected shared similar political views. Anderson revealed his plan to Dennis Meade and asked for assistance. Meade replied that if Anderson attempted such a rash plan, he would call on the real Texas Rangers to stop him. His ardor thus cooled, Anderson abandoned the scheme. In retrospect, his move to Texas in 1859 appears rash and unwise. He was so smitten with his beloved Lady Liberty that he may have misread fatal flaws in the Constitution as mere hairline cracks in the folds of her otherwise sparkling marble gown. Anderson was not alone. Throughout the tortuous final years of the 1850s, few leaders could actually conceive that sectional divisions and jealousies could lead to the most catastrophic of outcomes.
Union supporters in Texas were bolstered in these delusions in August 1859. The election of Sam Houston to the governor’s chair by a majority of nearly eighty-seven hundred votes came amid the largest turnout in state electoral history. Houston had defeated incumbent governor Hardin R. Runnels, whose Democratic Party’s platform included formal reopening of the slave trade. Anderson attended several campaign events and felt that Houston’s emotional connection with his audience was as great as any speaker he had ever seen. He later stated that Houston was the most courageous Union man that ever breathed. Both Houston and Anderson ended up paying a high price for their patriotism. Strong Union supporters like Houston existed among the most influential public men in almost every Southern state. Such Democrats were busy preparing a conservative platform that, they hoped, would triumph in the next presidential election and save the country. The events of the next twelve months exposed that dream as pure fantasy, however. The most sensational of these events was certainly the seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia by radical abolitionist John Brown and his gang in October 1859. Brown had intended to kindle a slave uprising, leading many Southerners to recall with horror the murders committed by escaped Virginia slave Nat Turner’s mob just thirty years earlier.10
Back in Cincinnati, Larz Anderson was sure that his youngest brother’s Texas adventure was destined to fail. He knew that the only way to persuade Charles to abandon his folly would be to appeal to his latent ambition. With a foreign post unlikely and the prospect of Civil War looming, Larz succeeded in convincing the Buchanan administration that his youngest brother was the right candidate for assistant secretary of state. Postmaster general Joseph Holt, a former judge from Ohio, tendered the formal offer on February 3, 1860. Anderson received it two weeks later. It was a tempting opportunity. The current secretary, Lewis Cass, was said to be in ill health, and this appointment could be a stepping-stone to the Cabinet. The experience would give Anderson national exposure and prepare him for higher office. It turned out to be one of the most important decisions of his life.
After careful consideration, Anderson declined Holt’s offer. His old colleague was persistent and urged him to reconsider, but Charles would not budge. He was tired of politics. He could not stomach working alongside fire-eaters like James G. Breckenridge, who actively advocated disunion. Besides, the Union had been endangered before and cooler heads had always prevailed.11 Later that same month, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi introduced resolutions to affirm that the federal government was obliged to protect slave-holding interests in the territories. Davis knew full well that this issue would split the Democratic Party in the upcoming convention. The resolutions would also blunt Steven Douglas’s efforts to establish popular sovereignty in new states and territories. The Union was in serious jeopardy. Anderson realized that the “sham of state equality,” as he called it, was no longer the exclusive doctrine of extremists like William L. Yancy of South Carolina. The lie had become the favored dogma of the Southern Democratic Party in what Anderson described as the “morbid madness of their unbridled lust for power.”12
Anderson’s dreams were disintegrating and he could no longer pretend otherwise. In March 1860 he placed an ad in the Goliad Messenger, seeking the return of twenty-three Spanish mares, two saddle horses, a roan, and a sorrel pony that had been “lost.” Stock not endangered by extended drought, rattlesnake bites, or other natural hazards were continually at risk of being stolen by Indians, bandits, or even unscrupulous neighbors. Lawlessness and violence in Texas was growing as loyalty to the Union ebbed.13 Independence Day proved melancholy. Anderson called it “our national Holy Day” and exclaimed, “Great God! Is it to be our last?” He could now see that disunion was a distinct probability and his mood was gloomy. “Poor fool,” he lamented, “to love one’s country to the point of distress.” When he looked to the future, Anderson saw “a hell of woes . . . bleeding, blazing, groaning directly and boundlessly beyond.” Tragically, this vision would come to pass.
A few days earlier, workmen constructing his house had found one of the Andersons’ two slaves, a young black boy named Dan, dead in the river. Charles was convinced that the boy had been murdered. By the end of July, violence against blacks had escalated into one of the most shameful events in the history of the young state. Rumors of imminent slave uprisings and o
ther conspiracies of blacks and abolitionists were routinely planted in newspapers in Texas and throughout the South, concocted by Southern radicals to frighten and inflame readers. The result was horrific brutality in Texas in 1860.14
The summer had been a scorcher. Temperatures rose to 110 degrees in northern Texas on the afternoon of July 8, and several large fires broke out. The blazes burned most of downtown Dallas to the ground, razed half the town square in Denton, and destroyed a store in Pilot Point. At first, spontaneous combustion and the recent introduction of phosphorous matches were deemed the likely cause of these unfortunate events. One man, however, saw political opportunity among the ashes. Four days after the fires, the editor of the Dallas Herald, Charles R. Pryor, wrote explosive letters to state leaders and newspaper editors. He suggested that the fires had been started by recently expelled abolitionist preachers and their black friends as part of a widespread conspiracy to destroy the entire state. He called the supposed plot “a regular invasion, and a real war.” Pryor’s letters were printed in newspapers across the state. Many communities formed vigilance committees to capture the alleged instigators. Despite the absence of any evidence that the fires were set by anyone, local lawmen looked the other way while gangs of citizens lynched an estimated one hundred innocent blacks and whites. The panic abated by September, just in time for the presidential election. Southern extremists used what they euphemistically called “the Texas Troubles” to inflame sectional passions, painting Abraham Lincoln as an abolitionist whose Republican Party was behind the events.15
Emotions ran so high in San Antonio in the months before the presidential contest that local Unionists like Anderson could not safely promote their candidates in public. In August a courageous twenty-three-year-old Unionist named James P. Newcomb stepped up to the task. He started a Union paper called the Alamo Express. In its pages Anderson and other Union men could express their political views through the voice of the young editor. Anderson’s motto in the 1860 presidential election was simple: “Anything to defeat Lincoln. Almost anything to defeat Breckenridge.” He believed that the triumph of either sectional party spelled almost certain disunion. Thus he followed his brother Larz in supporting John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts in the newly imagined Constitutional Union Party. Even Stephen A. Douglas, whom Anderson had despised as the agent behind the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, was preferable to the sectional candidates. The diminishing Union circle in San Antonio waited with apprehension as the election of Lincoln became a foregone conclusion.16
CHAPTER SEVEN
Debate at Alamo Square
THE DAY AFTER THE NEWS of Abraham Lincoln’s election reached San Antonio, handbills appeared on walls and fences around town. The posters called for all Breckenridge men to assemble in Alamo Square and consider next steps in the wake of this momentous event. Within a few days a second notice appeared extending the invitation to all citizens of Bexar County. Unaware that a meeting was scheduled, Charles Anderson rode into town the morning of the rally to purchase supplies at George W. Caldwell’s store. Excitement ran high. Several Union men gathered at the store and urged him to stay and speak at the meeting that evening. Anderson’s conscience would not allow him to refuse. Forgoing his usual meticulous preparation, this speech would have to come straight from the heart.1
Local secessionists fixed the agenda, but the Unionists had their own plan for the meeting. Celebrated Methodist preacher Dr. Jesse Boring began the assembly with a secessionist speech that was as measured and dispassionate as it was firm and confident. He argued that the Union was in effect already dissolved. In the middle of Boring’s address, Union men raised the national banner on a flagpole behind the stage, and the crowd erupted in cheers. As soon as Boring concluded his remarks, prearranged calls for Anderson came from the crowd. Anderson felt inspired with “the most inflamed, indignant, outraged specimen of old Clay temper and Patriotism.” He calmly ascended the ladder to the stage as if he had been the featured speaker.
Almost no one in the audience had heard Anderson speak in public. Before he launched into a refutation of Boring’s central theme, Anderson reminded the audience that he was born and reared in a slaveholding family. He said that his time in the North had given him a broad perspective and a more objective view of the sectional issues. With no political allegiances or entanglements to sway him, Anderson argued that he could divine the truth in this critical matter. He implored his audience to take a deep breath and consider the gravity of the decision they faced. “Have sectional partisans finally dared to make, or devise, an assault upon this beloved and most glorious Union, which our fathers of the South and the North shed their united blood to cement and establish?” This was not a popular revolt that was brewing in Texas and other Southern states, according to Anderson. It was a power grab by unscrupulous politicians who wanted to establish their own separate government based on slavery.
If the Union really is dissolved, Anderson asked, what happens next? Do they return to the Lone Star Republic? Should Texans form an alliance with a confederation of Southern states that did not yet exist? “In nature,” he explained, “there are no lone stars. They cluster and constellate.” The former Republic of Texas “darted upwards with the speed of a comet” to join with the other United States in its constitutional system. Would they just as rapidly abandon this course without just cause? The idea of a Southern constellation of states was equally abhorrent and unwarranted, according to Anderson. Despite the hype and fear mongering from the fire-eaters, neither Lincoln nor the Republican Party had espoused, in words or platform, any desire to interfere with the institution of slavery where it was already established. To say otherwise, as secessionists claimed, was to create a pretext for disunion based on “the figments of a heated and diseased imagination.”
A voice in the crowd demanded that they hear “no more of these Black Republican arguments,” but Anderson was just warming up. “Nor am I coward enough to fear such taunts, and to prevent me from boldly denouncing such statements,” the speaker exclaimed, “when used for such unholy purposes. I have, I say, met and resented assault in other crowds, where to defend your rights, required, at least, real manhood.” This may have been true, but Anderson had never made such bold statements under such dangerous circumstances. He tried to appear nonpartisan by enumerating the many hostile actions that abolitionist radicals in the North had taken against Southern states. He chastised Massachusetts for repeatedly nullifying fugitive slave laws. This was cause for righteous indignation, Anderson admitted, but not for national suicide.
Anderson was not above using fear tactics himself when his beloved Union was at risk. If Southerners opt for disunion, he maintained, they must be prepared for disastrous consequences. “Could we then hold three millions of our slaves in their proper bondage and subjection with our left hands, whilst we should smite their pale faced allies with our right?” This was a shrewd attempt to turn existing fears of slave insurrection against the very fire-eaters who had created them. He begged his listeners not to deplore Northern fanaticism while ignoring the same dangerous folly at home. Northern extremists could not trample the Constitution and its explicit protection of the South’s peculiar institution. Southern extremists must not use lies and distortion to foment revolution where no proximate cause existed. “Must the true, permanent, invaluable interests of the Southern people,” he asked, “be forever made a sacrifice to mere politics?”
Boring’s tired assertion that the Constitution gave each state the right to secede for any reason was easy fodder for Anderson’s sharp wit. The mere thought of such a no-fault divorce in a bond of national matrimony was unthinkable in nineteenth-century America. “Secession,” Anderson explained, “was what General Jackson proclaimed it: only revolution.” He finished his speech with the same passionate and eloquent appeal for the Union that his former Ohio neighbors had so often heard. “Let us look again on that banner of beauty and glory,” Anderson pleaded. “Oh! May thi
s flag of our Father’s Union—our Union—no sister star bedimmed or gone rayless and lost in outer darkness, our whole constellation complete. Oh! May it thus stand and remain the most loved and treasured legacy to our latest posterity, co-existent with the earth, the air, the very sun himself.” The Germans and Irish in the crowd, who had cowered in fear of being branded abolitionists, burst into cheers as Anderson walked from the stage. The Union banner fluttered in the moonlight. The celebration soon died down as the next scheduled speaker took the stand.
Colonel John A. Wilcox, a former Methodist preacher turned Know-Nothing politician, resumed the tirade against the supposed plans of Lincoln’s abolitionist allies. Unlike Boring, Wilcox was a bombastic fire-eater of the first stripe. His role in the proceedings was to excite the secessionists. He attacked Anderson and all appeals to a conservative path forward with ferocious fury. Wilcox made point after point, ending with references to “the gentleman” from Ohio. Phrases like “abolition politicians,” “stealing niggers,” and “nigger equality in railroad cars” dominated his harangue. Wilcox’s supporters gathered around the stage and shouted in chorus with each charge: “This no cause for secession? The gentleman from Ohio says not.” When the colonel finally accused Anderson of being in friendly alliance with Ohio’s most infamous abolitionists, Charles lost his composure. Fuming with indignation, he rushed the stage and pushed his way to the foot of the ladder, intending to physically assault Wilcox for this egregious insult. Fortunately, Daniel Story, a friend and fellow rancher, grabbed Anderson and prevented him from starting a melee.
The Lost Gettysburg Address Page 7