The identity of the father of Lucia Carter’s baby is a mystery; he might have been David Davis or Oliver Benton or Albert Parsons. The fact that she named the little boy Champ suggests at least the possibility that she wanted to acknowledge the man who allowed her to rendezvous with Parsons in Carter’s storeroom—Champe McCulloch, Parsons’s next-door neighbor and fellow Freemason. In any case, the spurned Oliver Benton (who later said he had contemplated killing Parsons) on at least one occasion burst in on Lucia and Albert at their trysting place. Benton said he “scourged” Lucia all the way back to his cabin, implying he had cracked a bullwhip on her, but perhaps those claims revealed merely the bravado of a humiliated man.2
In the summer of 1870, Lucia’s mother, Charlotte Carter, was living in Waco’s River Street black neighborhood. Charlotte, now thirty-six, reported to a census taker that her household included one daughter, Lucia (nineteen years old), and two sons, Tanner (fourteen) and Webster (eight). Another apartment in the modest frame building housed Jane Tallavan and her children and Lucia with one-year-old Champ. The census recorded Lucia as a literate mulatto. In Jane and Lucia’s unit were also living a freedwoman named Lizzie Murphy, a twenty-two-year-old native of Alabama; Lizzie’s two sons, ages five and seven months; and a freedman, James Johnson, a twenty-five-year-old from Mississippi.3
Perhaps the suffocating heat of a July midday had clouded the census-taker’s judgment; or perhaps, as a nonnative English speaker (he was a German immigrant), he misunderstood Charlotte’s description of the family’s living arrangements. Although overlapping census districts at times resulted in “duplicates”—a person counted more than once—it was unusual for a census-taker to list the same person twice as a member of two separate households in the same building. That Charlotte reported Lucia as living with her, but the daughter was actually living in a different apartment, with her infant son as well as a man and a woman and two other children, suggests several possibilities—an estrangement between mother and daughter; a desire on the part of the younger woman to establish a household apart from her mother; or a liaison with James Johnson, a lover.
If Champ’s father is unknown, so, too, are the circumstances of his birth. Lucia had become pregnant when she was about the same age at which her mother, Jane Tallavan, and Lizzie Murphy had all had their first babies. During Lucia’s labor, was she comforted by the presence of the three women, and were others present? Did she have an easy time of it, or hours filled with pain? Did someone pay for the services of a midwife? Or did she bear the child alone, away from her mother and from the man who considered her his wife, but was by now perhaps consumed with suspicion and jealousy? In the summer of 1870, Lucia was living apart from Benton, and she had given the baby the last name Carter, which had been her own last name since her mother had married Charlie Carter. Charlotte and Charlie were also presumably living apart from each other, as he was not listed as a part of her household, though he was still working at the brickyard east of the Brazos River. (He would remarry in 1888.)
In 1870, Albert Parsons was boarding in the northwest part of town, in a well-to-do area on high ground away from the river, with the family of a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend David C. Kinnard. For all his speechifying, Parsons must have struck Kinnard as a respectable young man; the pastor of the newly formed Cumberland Church would have demanded no less of a boarder (or perhaps he was doing Parsons’s well-to-do sister Mary a favor). Next to the Kinnard residence was the impressive dwelling of the Missouri-born merchant Champe C. McCulloch, living with his wife, Emma, and their nine-month-old son, also named Champe. By this time, Parsons was working as an assistant collector for the Internal Revenue Service, a patronage job that rewarded his service to the Republican Party. He would seem to be tempting fate, now that he was not only associated with the despised party of Lincoln, but also collecting taxes in a town that had shown overwhelming support for the Confederacy. Yet Waco did possess a small but vocal knot of northern supporters and sympathizers—former Confederates, such as Parsons, who had deserted the Democrats; Freedmen’s Bureau agents and Davis, the Yankee schoolmaster; a couple of hundred black voters as well as bold activists such as Shep Mullins; a few foreign-born and northern migrants who had held their counsel during the war; and, in a soon-to-be-dismantled US Army garrison, forty-nine white soldiers hailing from Western Europe and the southern and northern states who had all been deployed to Waco to keep a fragile peace. Although these groups, according to a Union officer, were initially targets of the “most intense hatred,” by 1870 some of them had made accommodations with former Confederates—Davis, for example, had ingratiated himself with local Democrats, and the federal troops were hosting grand balls for their white neighbors at the Masonic Hall on the plaza.4
The relationship between Albert Parsons and Lucia Carter soon became an open secret among white and black Wacoites, though little is known about the precise nature of that relationship. For Parsons, the year 1870 had begun auspiciously. Black voters, enfranchised since 1867, were working with German immigrants and other Republicans to challenge the white-supremacist power of the Democrats. After years of delay, the state legislature had finally ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, granting the former slaves citizenship rights, and enfranchising black men, respectively. A new state district judge in town, Republican John W. Oliver, was promising a no-holds-barred assault on bands of white criminals and vigilantes. The inauguration of the Radical Republican governor Edmund J. Davis in April had breathed new life into the party and given Parsons a new mission as a political organizer. In Waco, black men were getting jobs as police officers, sitting on petit and grand juries, and receiving appointments as county commissioners. Widely seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, Parsons was skillful at straddling its conservative and radical wings. Yet demographic patterns signaled dangers ahead: the county’s explosive population growth meant that soon, in sheer numbers at least, white Southerners would easily overwhelm the small, badly divided Republican Party.5
Both William and Albert Parsons gained prominence in the 12th legislative session, a session that saw Republicans using every means at their disposal to bolster the tenuous power they possessed. Soon after he took office, Governor Davis created several new law-enforcement agencies—the Frontier Forces, the State Guard, the Reserve Militia, the State Police, and the Minute Men. Democrats saw all these armed groups as a threatening escalation in state power. In January 1870, Davis appointed Judge Oliver to the 33rd Judicial District in Central Texas, which included Limestone, Falls, and McLennan Counties. Davis exhorted his followers to bring in more white voters. Meanwhile, Albert Parsons began to canvass on behalf of the Union League and the Radical Republican Association, groups of like-minded blacks and those few whites who believed the party’s priorities should focus on equal rights for all.6
In the late summer and early fall of 1870, Parsons conducted a concerted campaign to reach out and flatter prominent party leaders in an effort to counter the infighting that was pitting Waco Republicans against each other. He reported that too many men were embracing Democratic prejudices while calling themselves Republicans. In August, he warned the governor that “enemies” skulking about “under the cloak of Republicanism” were seeking to undermine “the united desires of all genuine Republicans.” In Waco, these false friends were trying to oust the current mayor, B. F. Harris, for malfeasance in office. Parsons also began a correspondence with James P. Newcomb, editor of the Republican San Antonio Express and a powerful arbiter in Texas politics. Parsons feared that his “being an Ex Rebel Republican” had compromised his own ability to rectify what he called the “evils” that plagued Waco; he cited the local postmaster, who, though “he vociferously asserts his Republicanism,” together with other political appointees constituted “an actual encumbrance and dead weight to us.” Parsons saved his choicest words for David Davis, the schoolmaster turned district clerk. According to Pars
ons, to his “chagrin and mortification” Davis was shamelessly larding his office with Democrats. Parsons added, “There is a Republican harvest here but faithful laborers are few.”7
Parsons set about organizing petitions to Republican officials, declaring in one that “we suffered and born [sic] much from our enemies and unless we get relieve [sic] immediately much more injury will be done.” The signatories represented a cross-section of the Waco Republican Party—a merchant born in Poland; a number of freedmen, including Shep Mullins; and southern-born white men, including a saloonkeeper from South Carolina, a stable owner from North Carolina, and Mayor Harris, from Georgia. Parsons’s aggressive efforts to curry favor with blacks won him his own Waco “faction,” prompting his nemesis John T. Flint to alert the governor that “the Parsons faction here is irresponsible, and if they go into power will offend the sense of justice of all decent men whether Republican or not.” In the coming months, Parsons would go out of his way to ingratiate himself with Newcomb, reporting at one point that he had defended the editor against the unkind words of a local Republican official who had called the editor “too vain, conceited, and selfish.”8
Throughout this period, Parsons seemed to relish battles against both diehard rebel Democrats and the men whom he considered disloyal to his own brand of Republican Party politics. In fact, though, developments in 1871 gave him hope that he would have a chance not only to ascend the party ranks but also to make a substantial living in the course of doing so. He went back to soliciting subscriptions—now for Houston’s Union/Tri-Weekly Union. In January, he was appointed to the administrative position of first assistant secretary of the Senate for the regular session, which ran from January 10 to May 31. This job he had secured with the help of his brother—now Senator Parsons—as well as through his own successful efforts to gain the favor of party higher-ups. As first assistant secretary he updated the official daily journal of the Senate, recording events, proceedings, and votes. Each morning he distributed two newspapers to lawmakers—one in English, the Austin Daily State Journal, and the other in German, the Austin Vorwarts (Forward). A quick study, he probably used the Vorwarts to practice his German, since an understanding of the language was essential to communicating with a vital Republican constituency.9
The 12th legislative session represented the high-water mark of Reconstruction-era Texas Republicanism. Lawmakers funded the state’s first public school system, which had been created on paper the previous session but deprived of an appropriation, and chartered black mutual aid societies and social groups. Governor Davis deplored the prevalence of firearms in the state and urged state lawmakers to impose restrictions on gun ownership, a plea that came to fruition in 1871 with a ban on the carrying of pistols outside the home (travelers and those whites living in areas vulnerable to Indian raids were exempt). Yet riven by intraparty factionalism as well as party divisions, most legislators had no appetite for controversy. A proposal to send funds to the people of Chicago in the wake of the catastrophic fire in that city in October 1871 went down to defeat with the argument that Texas citizens should not be taxed “for the purpose of making gifts to individuals.”10
Nevertheless, Republicans wasted little time enacting measures favorable to business interests. Legislators bolstered commercial development and regional trade by chartering railroads, bridges, toll roads, ferries, canals, dams, waterworks, and fire companies as well as private manufacturing interests. They legislated in favor of stock raisers and bankers; the recording of births and marriages; and foreign immigration into the state (to address a chronic agricultural labor shortage). William Parsons represented the interests of the “Houston Mechanical Verein” (Union) to shore up his bona fides with a German group back home. He served as chair of Internal Improvements, the political epicenter of the session.11
For his support for measures such as “an Act to encourage the speedy construction of a railway through the State of Texas to the Pacific Ocean,” William would solidify his reputation as a railroad man. Not all lawmakers were on board: some saw state subsidies to private and public interests, whether railroads or schools, as a form of “black mail” extracted from the people. In the lower house, freedmen expressed their own priorities by pressing for the redistribution of land to the former slaves and measures to protect black suffrage.12
As legislative clerk, Albert Parsons made the enviable sum of seven or eight dollars a day (urban workingmen were lucky to earn one dollar a day, while agricultural workers were paid largely in promises). And there is evidence that either he was the beneficiary of his older brother’s largesse or that on his own he eagerly sought perquisites from the state legislature to partake of the boom in internal improvements. With partners, he received charters to create a Waco Gas Light Company that would provide gas to streetlights and buildings in the town; to erect toll bridges in Navarro County; and to create a corporation, the Texas Manufacturing Company. Though nothing ever came of these charters, they represented the Republicans’—and presumably Parsons’s—conviction that the state could and should provide citizens with opportunities to make money in the private sector.13
In the summer of 1871, when his Senate job ended, Parsons went to work for the new Office of Public Instruction (OPI), which had been created to establish a system of free but segregated schools throughout the state. Living in the elegant Raymond House hotel in Austin, he was earning the munificent sum of $125 a month. For a three-month stint at the OPI he made a total of $375, an amount that would one day help finance his move out of Texas. At the end of August he got caught up in an alleged corruption scandal at the OPI; his remarkably generous salary (among other suspicious goings-on) had become grist for the mill of Democrats who considered public education largely a waste of the taxpayers’ money. In September, in the run-up to elections that fall, Parsons once again took to the road, addressing large crowds and prompting his detractors to describe him as one of “a set of men notoriously void of character and sent forth to disgust the Republican masses by their idiotic harangues.”14
In September, Governor Davis recognized Parsons for his party loyalty and raw courage by appointing him a lieutenant colonel in the reviled state militia and sending him to impose order in Bell, Coryell, and Lampasas Counties, where white attacks on blacks were rampant. Forty miles south of Waco in Belton, a freedman, the Methodist minister Romeo Hill, who was also a schoolteacher, observed that for blacks, “the times in Belton is very bad.” Hill begged the local bureau agent to reassign him to a school in another district “because these poor white people is so mean we cannot get [a]long here.” Hill was no coward—he had registered to vote in 1867—but he feared he would be murdered in his bed. “I don’t want to die before my time come,” he wrote. Hill, a thirty-eight-year-old native of North Carolina, expressed alarm not only at hostile whites, but also at the freedpeople, who, he wrote, armed with “their gun and knife and pistole,” believed that freedom gave them the license to make trouble and do as they pleased. “I cannot teach school hear [sic] in Belton and do it in piece [sic] and I want [to] go [a]way from here,” he wrote, adding, “Dear Sir there is no Law here to protect the school.”15
Governor Davis had sent Albert Parsons to confront the anarchy in Belton—to put in place a new Republican-friendly mayor and city council and install Republican supporters in the local police force. The outcome of Parsons’s expedition is unknown, but he later claimed that he was “not an ‘ornamental’ Colonel,” for he had accepted “a most warlike and dangerous undertaking”; in the process, he said, “I became somewhat famous as a champion of political liberty. Beloved by the blacks, I was hated and scorned by the whites”—and this scorn, coupled with the threat of lynching, he embraced.16
Meanwhile, Democrats continued to make steady gains at the polls throughout the state. The large numbers of southern white in-migrants added new members to the Democratic Party daily, and furthermore, victory in any particular election usually depended more on who controlled the ballot b
ox than on who won the most votes. The Republicans remained so hopelessly divided that even when their supporters were in a majority they lost elections to the unified Democrats, who, by the end of 1872, had reclaimed the state legislature. Forced now to rely on federal rather than state-level patronage, Albert Parsons was working once again as assistant assessor for the IRS in Austin.17
FROM AUSTIN, PARSONS COULD GET TO WACO EITHER BY MAKING the one-hundred-mile trip on horseback in three days or by taking an all-day train, but he knew he risked his life if he returned to the town for any length of time. Political tensions were running high in Waco, owing at least in part to the assertive actions of Judge Oliver. Since his appointment in January 1870, Oliver had used all the powers invested in him—calling out the militia, using black police as ballot-box watchers, declaring martial law, rounding up offenders—in an effort to stem the aggression of whites throughout the 33rd Judicial District. In May 1872, the intrepid—or incredibly foolish—judge had held the entire McLennan County Commissioners’ Court in contempt on an indictment for embezzlement and jailed all its members. The local bar association was moved to try to have him declared insane. On May 7, the Waco Advance published a broadside titled “Stop the Madman!” Oliver resigned in January 1873 before a grand jury could indict him for corruption.18
Albert Parsons understood that the judge’s departure signaled not only a marked decline in influence among Republicans in Central Texas but also less-than-favorable prospects for his own political future and his personal life. Nevertheless, the young man was in love, and he took a bold step: he married Lucia Carter on September 28, 1872. He was twenty-seven, she twenty-one. The marriage license was issued in McLennan County, though it is possible that the wedding took place in Cherokee County, to the east of McLennan. (William Parsons would later say that the couple married in Austin, but no evidence exists for that claim.) Albert gave the officiant his correct name, but it was the first and certainly not the last time that his bride would give a public official a different name—she is listed as Ella Hall (in the coming years she would at times give “Ella,” at other times “Eldine,” as her middle name, and use “Hall” as her maiden name). The couple took advantage of propitious legal developments; they married shortly after a state Supreme Court decision, Honey v. Clark, affirmed the Republican interpretation that a section of the new constitution meant that black and white people could marry, briefly opening the way for legal interracial nuptials. Democrats had argued that the section granted former slaves only the right to marry each other. The judge who married the two—no doubt a Republican—neglected to list his own name, though it is possible that it was Waco mayor B. F. Harris, who was a friend of Albert’s and was officiating around this time. Weeks later, Democrats would outlaw such weddings.19
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