Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
That many slaves were not entirely happy on the plantation is revealed by the fact that many ran away, desperately forging into Indian country, more often trying to reach the Rio Grande. Geography defeated them. It was very easy for a Negro to escape his master in far-flung Texas, but it was quite another for him to get away. The records show that most runaways, after a fearful sojourn in the wilds, crept back home.
Because of the mass white attitudes, these runaways were in far more danger of being lynched or flogged by non-slave-owning posses than of being punished by their legal masters. Sam Houston, as Senator, complained wryly about the hatred of simple blacks by agitators who possessed none. Several
Texas papers editorialized bitterly about the failure of the planters to "discipline their niggers" properly.
The evidence is that most owners treated their chattels with dehumanizing indifference coupled with genuine interest for their material welfare. Because it was so easy for a slave to escape south of the Guadalupe or Colorado, planters tried to keep them as contented as possible. Another reason, apparently, that slaves generally fared better in Texas than in some Southern states was that in Texas they were more valuable; they brought a greater price. These years saw a great "sale South" of surplus blacks from the Upper South, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. The older slaves along the Colorado, however, were spared the great Negro horror of being sold South, with separation of parents and children, because Texas was the end of the line. The history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere shows a definite pattern: where slaves were scarce, or in demand, they were treated with greater consideration. North America never recorded the disgusting tortures perpetrated on Negroes in Haiti and the Indies—crucifixion and burning alive on some islands where they were a dangerous surplus. In Texas, where a good buck was worth up to $2,000 in gold, the whipping post was sparingly used. The Brazos planter would no more have whipped a stubborn Negro than he would have ordered his overseer to torment a recalcitrant race horse or prize Berkshire pig. Ethics were also involved; gentlemen did not beat slaves.
However, the Southern pretension that a system of complete legal, moral, and physical domination of one race by another produced few abuses must be described as nonsense. It was the nature of power to be abused, and the slaveowner was restrained only by his ethic, not by custom or law. There were thousands of slaves who were treated like prized pets, or even lesser members of the family. There were others who were bred callously for their increase, and worked to death under a broiling sun generally considered too hot for white men to endure. Either way, destruction was visited upon the whole slave race.
But there is no question that on the better plantations slaves lived a better life, materially, than the poorer whites. Negro diet was similar to that of the western farmers, but in many cases it was better: the planter gave them garden plots and insisted that they raise and eat greens. The hands were usually fed from a common kitchen, which the planter supervised with some degree of pride. Hands were furnished two sets of clothes per year, and women two cotton dresses. The planters had already discovered it was cheaper to buy these in the industrial North than to have them locally made. Many slaves were permitted to earn money for special services, such as making shoes. A future Texas millionaire, as a slave, accumulated $600 in silver as a cobbler, at 10 cents per shoe. In 1865, he possessed more capital than his former master, who cheerfully helped him to invest it in choice lands.
In one important item, medical care, slaves fared much better than the people of the frontier. No planter could afford a sick slave, and he could afford doctors.
The basic weaknesses of such a colonial, nonindustrial, one-crop economy, in which all the true surplus was produced by servile labor, were recognized even then. No one saw any workable means of change. Criticism out of Boston was rejected as furiously as criticism out of Paris or Madrid would have been; the Texan was truly regional in attitude in a way northern Americans failed to comprehend. Although Texas was among the fastest-growing of all states in terms of settlement and new population, its growth was merely the spread of a static empire. Texas was painfully making a new Virginia or Georgia, and those regions were already anachronisms in the swirl of population and power of the 19th century. The planter's greatest crime was that he was already, nationally, out of date.
The Texas countryside, from the great semicircle of the frontier to the banks of the Sabine, was overwhelmingly rural. Distances, the lack of roads, the subsistence freehold, and the plantation economy all combined to keep it so. There was no industry, very little commerce, and therefore no real need for towns.
The lack or inadequacy of improved roads, ports, and rails, the backbone of commerce, was striking. The Texas Gulf coast was composed of bars, reefs, and shallow bays. It had always been hazardous for oceangoing vessels. There were almost no deep, natural harbors. The Colorado mouth was obstructed by a bar, and closed to shipping. The Brazos and Trinity were navigable, and Houston could be reached up Buffalo Bayou. Cópano and Corpus Christi bays, and the Laguna Madre at Point Isabel in the south, provided landing places. But these were not true harbors, only shallow, semisheltered bays. Ships had to be unloaded by lighter; there were no channels, docks, or improved facilities.
Steamboats provided transportation on the long, narrow, rapidly shallowing rivers, from the Trinity to the Rio Grande. These were adequate to move cotton out of, and a few trade goods into, the river bottom plantations. But as in 18th-century Virginia, the plantation system provided no spur to the growth of settlements.
The largest ports were Galveston and Matagorda, high on the coast. These served east Texas. Indianola, which was later destroyed entirely by a hurricane, was the main port of entry for the western regions.
It was difficult enough to get goods ashore in Texas, but it became a nightmare to move freight overland. Only a few miles of roadway in the entire state in 1860 were graded; exactly twenty miles in all was planked or similarly improved.
The arteries called "roads" were actually only well-defined main routes of travel between various points. The Camino Real between San Antonio and Nacogdoches was a prime example. In use since the early 18th century, in some places it was only a mass of wagon ruts cutting through the forest or across the prairie. Lesser roads throughout the state were more like cow trails. They were easy to follow, terrible to traverse.
Most travel over these roads was by horseback. Goods were hauled in giant-sized wagons—some carried 7,000 pounds—drawn by mules or oxen. In good weather, freight rates averaged 1 cent per mile per hundred pounds. In wet weather, the trails turned into quagmires. Freight did not move, because the charges in these periods were prohibitive. Even in dry seasons, the movement of freight or goods was painfully slow. There were continual complaints of mail arriving damaged or disastrously late.
Railroads, which had already linked most of the northern United States, were almost nonexistent in Texas. The first track was laid in 1852. This road ran only from Harrisburg on Buffalo Bayou to Richmond on the Brazos, or thirty-two miles. Houston tapped into this line with a road built through a civic tax, and several lines radiated out of Houston for short distances into the plantation country. There was a track from Marshall to Shreveport, Louisiana, and another from Indianola to Victoria. These track layings were all small, local efforts, and in no way connected the major areas of the state. The rails had to be supplemented in all directions by steamboat, wagon, or stage. Thus there were neither telegraphs nor post offices in most areas. San Antonio got its first post office in 1850, with a postmaster serving out of his own home without pay.
In the 1850s, a few excellent stage coaches began to appear on Texas roads. Stage became the principal carrier of passenger traffic, though stage line operators made their money from government contracts hauling mail. The superior stage coach service that began just before the Civil War, however, did not connect the principal Texas towns, and was never intended to. The Southern Overland Mail, the Butterfield, and another line ran stages regularly between San Antonio and San Diego, California, over new trails scouted by the army to the West. None of these could be considered part of the Texas transportation system, though they made it possible to ride from Missouri to West Texas.
Settlements were laid out in the Texas heartland, but they failed to grow. The largest settlements, significantly, were on the edges of Texas: Galveston, on the upper coast, the principal port, and San Antonio, in the far southwest, the jumping-off place for Mexico and California. Galveston, in 1850, had not quite 5,000 permanent residents. San Antonio, Houston, New Braunfels, and Marshall—widely scattered, and in no way connected or doing business with each other—followed in order of size. These were the only settlements that contained 1,000 or more people. Austin, the state capital, lay on the edge of the Indian frontier up the Colorado. Its population, including the government, was 600.
By 1860, German and other European immigration had raised San Antonio to 8,000, making it the first city in Texas. Galveston slipped to second place, among a total of twenty communities that counted 1,000 souls. The noticeable thing about the great corn- and cotton-growing belt of Texas was that it germinated few towns. In Texas, these grew up as centers of outside trade or distribution, and a wholly agricultural society just did not create cities. Brownsville, just across from Matamoros on the Rio Grande, was more of a city in these years than Dallas in the rich country of the north. Brownsville, and its merchants, lived off the border garrisons of the army. It had erected some dozen brick buildings, and established Catholic, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches. Its pattern of life was mercantile, like San Antonio's.
Many of the small settlements and communities of the original Anglo-Texas, in fact, in these years quite faded away. They had no function, and disappeared.
These towns of Texas varied greatly, due to different climatic conditions and different kinds of inhabitants. Apparently San Antonio, again the metropolis, had not much improved from the previous century. A German traveler, who wrote down his reactions, was as little impressed as the Spanish grandees who visited it earlier. The streets were unpaved, and impassable in rain; there were a few good limestone structures, nothing more. In the 1850s, however, this rapidly changed. European immigrants began to put up solid buildings, with what later were called typical Southwestern lines.
San Antonio supported itself almost entirely through California travel, and supplying the army garrisons that in the 1850s were scattered along the border river and the Comanche West. The Mexico trade, through the straggling adobe town of Laredo, was also important. San Antonio was a center for stage lines and freighting companies.
Galveston, on its island, was a center of deep-South architecture; it was putting up a number of stately frame mansions as men grew rich from seafaring and the cotton trade. Marshall, connected with Shreveport in the deep pine plantation country, already had handsome houses and public buildings of red brick. Galveston, Marshall, San Antonio, and Brownsville, all separated by hundreds of miles, also represented quite different worlds, inhabited by rather different kinds of people. In this age, there was no dominant standard of American architecture; each community, out of the traditions of its settlers, threw up its own.
There were no paved town streets anywhere, and aside from a few mansions such as Wyalucing in Marshall, the most imposing buildings in any town consisted of the courthouse and the public hotel.
The average hotel of the day was typical of the fringe of civilization: dirty, without services or courtesy, with guests assigned to common rooms and lucky to get them. Food was indifferent, mainly consisting of fried pork. The opening of the Menger, in San Antonio, was the beginning of a new era, connecting Texas with the Golden West. The Menger Hotel was built beside the crumbling walls of the chapel of the Alamo, whose outer walls had already been taken away for fence and building stones. The Menger was finely made, by European artisans, out of stone, two-and-a-half stories high. The furnishings were hauled in from the coast at enormous expense; they cost $16,000, when the U.S. dollar was worth fifteen to twenty times its later value. Here army officers, California travelers, or
hacendados
up from Mexico could bathe, dine, and drink in solid Victorian splendor. A graying lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army, Robert E. Lee, had a favorite room in this hotel. The Menger, and most hotels, however, were too rich for the average transient, who bunked down in wagon yards.
Almost anything, useful or luxurious, could be bought in San Antonio, Galveston, or other major towns. Everything arrived out of Europe or the North, usually via New Orleans, and with heavy mark-ups. Anyone with good money could purchase ice, jewelry, finely made guns, drugs, clothing, cosmetics, and good liquors. This trade was limited to a tiny, affluent class. The farmer families bought salt, powder, and lead, and sometimes a few yard goods on the side. Texas, except for a few, still did not represent a money economy.
The laws against incorporation of banks kept banks out of the state. Banking services, therefore, were carried on by freighting or mercantile firms, such as McKinney and Williams in Galveston, Groos in San Antonio and on the border, and a commission firm in Austin. These businesses and others like them held money on deposit, and made occasional loans. McKinney and Williams at last opened the first and only bank in Texas prior to 1861, through the use of an old State of Texas–Coahuila charter issued under Mexican rule in 1835 and a loophole in the law. The utter lack of banks and banking facilities, naturally, had a deadening effect on potential financial or industrial growth, but this was precisely the way the farmer-planter-dominated legislatures preferred it.