Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Aside from the emotional questions of right or wrong, or subordination and equality, emancipation by 1860 had become economically unreasonable. In Texas, the assessed value of all slaves was $106,688,920—20 percent more than the assessed value of all cultivated lands. Whatever its moral capital, the South had invested its economic capital in blacks. Like many another capitalist or dominant group before and since, the Southern gentry, in coping with a labor problem, had fallen into a terrible cultural and racial trap. It was more vulnerable to criticism than either the Northern industrialist paying out slave wages or a government using forced labor, because the cotton planter was creating no fruits for the descendants of his workers to enjoy. The great mass of Negroes were never expected to rise out of bondage. And the profits of the plantation economy were rapidly creating a new leisure class that, however admirable in many respects, was already an anachronism in the 19th-century Western world.
Seen in perspective, the Texas cotton planter was of all Americans closest to the old gentry or squirearchy of the Atlantic slopes. There was not much difference, in education, outlook, ethic, or manners, between a Texas cotton grower in 1860 and one of Long Island's landed gentry a hundred years before. Both held vast estates, both hunted and rode their fields, both believed in lavish hospitality, both were intimately engaged in public affairs. Neither considered their kind an aristocracy on the European order, but rather the natural leaders of a society of freemen. Nothing is clearer than that the "deferential society" of colonial America, with its ethical liberalism, economic conservatism, and somewhat organic outlook, survived all the way to Texas, while concurrently it dissolved in the North. There was no real regression—but there was little change. More than any other group in the 19th century, the planters tended to perpetuate the manners, ideals, traditions, politics, and codes of the gentry that founded the United States. But where Washington, the Adamses, the Morrisses, Livingstons, Monroes, and others once led an agricultural American society, the Texas planter now existed in an American nation where 92 percent of the productive power and two-thirds of the people had abandoned deferential ways. He was still powerful and respected in his region, but he was beginning to be despised nationally, for reasons that went far beyond slavery.
As both its politics and literature show, the American North meanwhile had gone through a process of vulgarization, immigration, economic growth, and political change. The Northern gentry never extended beyond the valley of the Hudson or the center of Pennsylvania, and where they stood, they were submerged.
While the puritan, egalitarian society of the frontier developed unhindered through Ohio westward, a combination of European immigration, rising industrial wealth, decline of the old rational ethic, and the increasing turbulence, violence, and economic fanaticism of America itself sapped the original gentry. As lethal as anything was the growing power and concept of money, which seemed to have a deadly effect on the public spirit and instincts of the squirearchy. And in its way, the westward movement destroyed the old liberal, ethical America: the nation exploded across the continent, killing Indians and Mexicans, building a vast economy and a dynamic industrial machine. All of this seemed to happen without rational decision or control; the governments of America merely kept adjusting or reacting or rationalizing to events already in full swing. The Eastern gentry were generally in favor of none of these things; they could not prevent them. The election of Andrew Jackson was not a blow against the gentry, but merely a symptom of its decline and of the rise of a new necessity for America: the political party, and the political boss, and the alliance between groups and regions rather than compromises worked out by a few men. The gentry had always been regional in outlook, fighting for a strong Federalism only to assure credit and good order. But the rise of the first political boss, Martin Van Buren, without whom Jackson could not have reached the White House, indicated a new kind of Federalism was in the wind. At the same time, the precipitation of a financial panic by the gentry opposed to the first President "from the people" indicated starkly the bankruptcy of what had once been America's most ethical group or class, and showed that the American people, perhaps, needed a new type of tribune. By the 1830s, it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish a genuine American gentry. The old families had increasingly declined into a mere financial or industrial upper class, whose rational ethos was already operating on a kind of Darwinism before Charles Darwin popularized his limited studies of what was then thought to be the way of all life.
This was logical, a reasonable outgrowth, because apparently America had been operating under a form of social Darwinism for some time. It no longer seemed either feasible or reasonable for a handful of intelligent, highly motivated men to shape, or even direct, public affairs. At any rate, there was a mass desertion of public service by the old-new rich. If three out of four of the new financial or industrial elite came from old colonial families, all disappeared into the economic whirlpool. The age of the coal or steel senator, manipulated by money interests, was at hand. The power of northern America was increasing by quantum leaps, while the loss of social values was equally profound, long before the existing situation was rationalized into the new Republican Party.
The changes in the North were also erasing state boundaries. There was a tendency among immigrants from Europe, whether Irish or German, to insist on being Americans, not citizens of Illinois or New York, and this had its influence. But industrialism and the tying-in of the Midwest with the North economically was a greater factor in changing the view of sovereign states to one of a unitary nation. The emerging, classless, amorphous, silk-stockinged new elite in the North was largely without ethic, and thus without responsibility, but it did have clear economic vision: they looked upon the United States not as an alliance of regions but as a potential market. The industrial leadership's role in forging national laws and destroying state powers over business and industry was to be immensely greater in the 19th century than the efforts of all the reformers and advocates of Presidential power combined.
The life, and the role, of the Texas planter was light-years removed from that of the Northern businessman and from the existence of the subsistence farmer who lived beside him. The planters had gone a long way to forging Texas in the old, or 18th-century, American image.
By the time Texas became a state, "planting" was becoming less and less a business enterprise and a road to wealth, and more and more a genuine way of life. Cotton planting, despite falling prices in the 1850s, was still profitable. But the evidence indicates that many successful men in other lines, such as law or medicine, deliberately bought plantations and slaves at an outlay that could hardly be remunerative for years. Even in bad years, the prices paid for field Negroes constantly rose. Most successful men aspired to be planters, for the same reasons that English merchants of the 18th century purchased landed estates at prohibitive prices—eighteen or more times annual rents. The ownership of Negroes, with its implied and actual removal from trade or labor, imparted status. It was impossible for a man to pose as a landed gentleman without slaves.
Contrary to popular opinion, even a large number of European immigrants who settled in or bordering the Anglo heartland by 1860 had purchased blacks.
Owning slaves, however, did not make a man a planter. The title belonged only to families who had enough black capital to justify the expense of a white overseer—usually considered to be twenty or more Negroes. The planter, who never called himself a farmer, was thus completely removed from direct participation in his enterprise; he was a member of an owning, directing, semi-leisure class. He gave orders to his overseer, or rode past his fields; he rarely entered them except for inspections.
The vast majority of Texans owned no slaves, although they were farmers. More than half of the actual slaveholders owned five or less. These men supervised their own slaves, and frequently worked in the fields beside them. Although some thousands of yeoman farmers owned between one and twenty Negroes, the true planting class was extremely small. It numbered about two thousand families. Of these, only fifty-four held one hundred or more slaves. Since a good field hand could be rented out for $200 to $300 per year, or was expected to produce eight bales of cotton, these families were relatively quite rich. And since a healthy field hand cost as much as $2,000 in Texas, and a "plow boy" almost as much, the larger planters held an enormous money investment in their way of life. In these years the greatest Texas planters were very rich, even by Northern money standards. This was not unnoticed, or unresented, in the North and West.
During this period, there was a continual importation of Negroes from the older states, particularly those of the upper South, where the plantation economy was phasing out. Importation from Africa or the Indies was illegal. However, dealers in Galveston and Houston, on the coast, were always able to have slaves of all ages and both sexes in stock. The mayor of Galveston himself supervised a slave auction at least once a week. The supply never quite caught up with the demand. The common supposition that Texas, or the Gulf South, was or would soon have abandoned slavery for economic reasons does not bear out. Between 1850 and 1860, the census years, the slave population of Texas increased 213.8 percent. The white population, in these same years, rose at a rate of approximately 177 percent.
In the old Brazos-Colorado colony and in much of east Texas, the black people greatly outnumbered the white. Only at the plateau line, in central Texas, did the countryside become completely white. And slavery was encroaching westward; it would have reached the Dallas-Sherman line in a few years, as soon as it was realized the black prairie soils would grow cotton as efficiently as coastal muck.
Freed from work, if not from worry, by his slaves, the planter had both the time and inclination to be influential in the state. As an obviously wealthy and successful man, he was given at least a grudging due and deference. Almost every true planter enjoyed considerable influence in his own area or county. Lesser men consulted him on political or business affairs; his choice for sheriff or commissioner was closely watched. He performed the only true social life in the county, and he set the dominant social standards other families looked up to. The greatest planters were known throughout the state, and some had influence in Washington.
In his own society, the Texas planter was neither passé nor phasing out; if he had suffered the general loss of ethic and rationalism the whole century was heir to, he was still vigorous and possessed of high morale. He had not succumbed to the funks of the Northern landed class, who were increasingly taking refuge in pure money power. Significantly, the planters had little true money power; their influence was based on deference and the fact they filled a social vacuum at the top. Many planters dabbled in mercantile enterprises and investments on the side, and they were completely allied with the practitioners of the law. Most judges were planters; and many planters, with no intention of serving at the bar, read law. Lawyer, clergyman, doctor, and—a tradition that never saw birth in the North—soldier were the genteel occupations; at the base of all these, around which they revolved, was the landed slave estate.
The mark of the planter class was not its wealth as such but its removal from labor and economic activities. This was a tradition carried unbroken from the English squirearchy of the past, as was the tradition of concern with public affairs. Also, a significant number of planter families were Episcopalian, in a Trans-Appalachian West where the mass of farmers had deserted the Reformation churches for fundamentalism.
Although there was ample evidence of class conflict in the South, particularly in the mountain states, it is difficult to uncover this in Texas. The biggest reason was that Texas was new country, with millions of acres of undeveloped lands. A family that found itself stifled or encroached upon by burgeoning planters in the east could move easily up the rivers toward the west. The small farmers thus congregated in their own belts beyond the planter coast; they did not yet really impinge upon each other. The dirt farmer could and did resent the planters' prosperity and social arrogance. But although the planters strongly influenced state politics, they did not, in this era, deny the poorer whites anything to which they considered themselves entitled. The small farmer was as violently opposed to direct taxation on his acres, for any social purpose, as was the conservative, constitutionalist planter on his estate.
Nothing like a landlord-tenant, noble-serf, or employer-employee relationship existed. The aristo-democracy of Texas worked well, because every citizen was, or had the potentiality to be, a freeholder. This system, however, confused not only some later Americans, but contemporary European immigrants of socialistic views. Some Germans in San Antonio went about nailing up placards condemning the "oppressor class" while Anglos read these with bewilderment. It was, of course, impossible for any Texas white to identify with "niggers"; many Europeans, however, were too recently removed from serfdom. It was very easy for newcomers, unfamiliar with American society, to equate cotton planters with cotton barons.
The sweat of his Negro chattels allowed the planter to live better than anyone in Texas; the life of plantation whites was a different world from the disorder and labor of the average dog-run. Although a feature of early Anglo-Texas was that all classes, planter with slaves and free farmer alike, lived in hastily thrown-up log cabins, many of the planters were making incomes of $5,000 or more while the yeoman had a surplus of only a few bags of corn. Immediately after San Jacinto, some of Austin's Old Three Hundred began erecting impressive houses. These dwellings were built of walnut, pine, cedar, or cypress planks, and in a few cases out of brick. Texas plantation houses were similar to, but did not follow exactly, the Greek revival architecture of the Mississippi delta. They were generally less large and imposing, and had simpler lines; this was probably due to the influence of the ever-present frontier. But they were sturdy and well built, with large and airy rooms, set into broad lawns or natural shrubbery. Most plantation houses had extended porches, or galleries, some surrounding the house. Many were fully carpeted, with decorated ceilings. Mirrors and chandeliers were shipped in from Europe, and marble for fireplaces was brought from Italy. Furniture, of walnut or other woods, was usually locally made, or imported from the United States; it was simply and beautifully made. Very few Texas country houses showed evidences of florid, baroque, or rococo styles; they did have lines that later builders often sought to imitate. The Varner Plantation House, built on the Brazos in 1836, Wyalucing, erected by Beverly Holcomb at Marshall in 1850, and the McNeel House, in Brazoria County, were outstanding examples of important family seats.