Lone Star (79 page)

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 of 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.

The Radical faction had no hope of ever coming to power in Texas through popular election, and they knew it. Their only hope was to precipitate an avalanche from the North, and they failed to pull strings to do so. The acts of lawlessness in Texas were exaggerated beyond reasonable belief, but there were people who believed these accounts, just as Southerners in 1859 had believed the worst about the North. A generation that cried over
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was demagogue meat.

Without the potent poison of political expediency being added, however, Texas would probably have been left alone. The final act of the American tragedy might have been avoided.

The Civil War ennobled no one, except perhaps its central figure, but it brought enormous and probably inevitable changes in the North. The Unionist states actually gained wealth, population, and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the Confederacy. War manufactures exploded industrial production, made agriculture prosper, and a flood of immigration from Europe more than replaced the blood and bone buried in the South. Until 1861, the full effect of the Industrial Revolution had been held in check by the powerful agronomists from Virginia to Texas. With this check removed, the industrial states consolidated their gains swiftly.

While the war itself was moving political power irresistibly toward the Federal capital in Washington, money power was centralized in New York through the wartime Currency Acts. And an enormous centralization, through economic expansion, was going on. Businesses and enterprises were being formed that soon transcended the states themselves. All these currents moved together. The removal of real power to a national capital was the first necessity for an expanded transportation and industrial complex that lay across many states. The concentration of fiscal power in New York broke the monetary freedom of state legislatures. As business enterprise became more and more national and spread on rails, old boundaries were, and had to be, meaningless. All this would, in quick time, forge a new society. The old America of a huge farming, small-holder class with a tiny mercantile and professional elite was not gone; vast islands of it remained. But it was submerged in flooding money and roaring steam.