Lone Star (82 page)

The Army had been ordered to close the polls in any place where trouble occurred. Significantly, this occurred only in heavily white counties, where Army officers apparently were hoping for reasons to stop the voting on any pretext. If a voter found his name stricken and argued the fact, the polls were immediately closed down. This cut the Hamilton vote.

In Navarro County, the registrar realized a heavy Hamilton majority was certain to be cast. This man took the registration lists and departed before the election; no votes from Navarro were ever counted. In Milam County, the polls opened, but the results were never reported in; they were not even counted. In Hill County, the ballots were removed to another jurisdiction, and counted by a single official, a Davis man. He reported a huge Davis majority, despite the fact that the vote certainly went the other way.

Less than one-half the registered white voters in Texas, in these circumstances, were able to cast a ballot.

There was no canvass, nor were the ballots ever made public. General Reynolds certified to President Grant that Davis had been elected, by a vote of 39,901 to 39,092. Despite the fact that affidavits charging fraud were sworn before magistrates all over the state, and even a number of U.S. Army officers protested to Reynolds about this farce, Reynolds certified the entire Radical ticket, and Grant refused to investigate.

Hamilton was counted out. Despite all handicaps, the evidence is overwhelming that he got almost the entire white vote. The returns on the ratification of the new state constitution were perhaps an indication. This was a Conservative document, which the Radicals detested. It carried, 72,466 to 4,928.

Led by E. M. Pease, a dozen Republicans of known integrity petitioned Washington. Documented cases of serious fraud, presented to Congress and the President, were ignored.

In an atmosphere reeking of Spanish cigars and sour Bourbon whiskey, the Radicals congregated in the capitol at Austin. General Reynolds eased the new regime on its way. On January 8, 1870, by general order, he appointed the officials-elect to office before their constitutional terms began. He convened the new twelfth legislature on February 8. Before convening it, he took the unusual step of appointing Major B. Rush Plumley speaker of the Texas House.

The twelfth legislature contained a Radical majority. Seventeen Radicals, seven Conservative Republicans, and six Democrats sat in the Senate; two of them were Negro. There were fifty Radicals, nineteen Conservatives, and twenty-one Democrats in the House. Eleven state representatives were black.

Four Texas Congressmen had been elected. Three were Radicals; the fourth, who claimed to be a Democrat, was a discharged Union Army officer and Carpetbagger.

The legislature routinely ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution without serious debate. J. W. Flanagan and Morgan Hamilton were elected to the U.S. Senate. On March 30, 1870, the President signed an act of Congress admitting the Texas delegation to sit in Washington. General Reynolds relinquished military authority to the Davis regime on April 16.

The Davis crew, flamboyant and energetic, was not without ability and a certain political genius. They had smelled the wind's direction and correctly trimmed their sails. Now, they showed a remarkable amount of political inventiveness.

Davis, who was born in Florida in 1827 and arrived in obscure circumstances in Texas in 1848 with his widowed mother, typified the rise of a new type of American officeholder. At some time he apparently read law, but no details are known. His main thrust in life was seeking office. In 1850 he gained the position of deputy customs collector of the Rio Grande. In 1853 he became a district attorney, and the year afterward, district court judge at Brownsville. He married the daughter of an army officer, and while in this post opted for the Union in 1861.

He spent the war either in exile in Mexico, or fighting Rip Ford's cavalry along the Rio Grande. He was commissioned a colonel of cavalry, and discharged at San Antonio in 1865 as a U.S. brigadier. He had no reason to love Texans, nor they him. By 1866, he was a leader of the faction demanding disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates, division of the state, and Negro suffrage. Now, in 1870, E. J. Davis was governor of Texas.

He was personally honest, and there were far worse Reconstruction governors in the Southern states. But Davis had some notions that bespoke a native ingenuity, and afterward, as a reaction, were to have long-lasting effects on his adopted state.

The first considered action of the Davis administration was to extend its term of office. Under the 1869 constitution, elections for Congress were to be held again in 1870 and for state officers in 1871. Davis's legislature by majority vote postponed both till November 1872. The official excuse was to make local and Federal elections coincide; Davis privately mentioned that the people would not be sufficiently "reconstructed" before 1872.

Morgan Hamilton, when he heard of this in Washington, choked on it. Probably, Hamilton had been sent to the capital to get him out of the way.

Davis next proposed a number of bills, each of which was most unusual in the American 19th century. The first was called the Militia Bill. The title was innocent; all states had militia regulations. But the Texas law put all male citizens between eighteen and forty-five subject to military duty, under the personal command of the governor. Its startling provisions, beyond this, were: the governor was permitted to declare martial law in any Texas county, suspend the laws, and maintain this until the legislature convened; the governor could assess the districts put under martial law for all costs of such operation, and also assess punishment of "offenders."

Another radical bill was a provision for a State Police. This would consist of 200 men, under the command of the governor through the state adjutant general. The State Police would have the authority to operate anywhere—hitherto, law enforcement was limited to sheriffs and local constables, who could not cross county lines. The State Police was to have extraordinary powers, including an unconstitutional privilege of taking offenders from one county to another for trial, and of operating undercover, as secret agents. At this time, there was no such force in any American state.

The Enabling Act enabled the governor to control patronage on a truly kingly scale. Under it he could appoint mayors, district attorneys, public weighers, and even city aldermen. It centralized power and patronage in the executive's hands as no American legislation ever had. Davis could and did appoint 8,538 state officials, earning $1,842,685 in salaries, and another 1,386 officers who were paid by fees.

The Printing Bill provided an official public printer, a state journal, and provided that regional newspapers be designated to print the various required official notices. This in effect instantly created an "official" state press, subject to government control and influence.

The terms "police state" and "propaganda machine" had not yet come into American English. The Davis Administration, in power in a state where nine-tenths of the white population detested it, was instinctively and logically doing what came naturally. It had not arrived in power through the democratic process; it could not be expected to behave democratically.

These Radical bills passed the Texas House easily, where the Radical majority was absolute. But a deadlock over the Militia and Police Bills developed in the Senate. The thirteen Conservative Republican and Democratic state senators formed a solid opposition bloc; a tie vote emerged. The governor handled this first legislative crisis firmly.

All thirteen opposition party senators were arrested and detained. This broke the tie—but someone noticed the state senate now lacked a quorum. Four of the detained men were released and hustled to the capitol to solve the problem. One of these officers was expelled shortly afterward for "resisting arrest."

The remaining Conservative and Democratic officeholders were kept under house arrest for three weeks. During this time, the entire package of Radical legislation was rushed through.

A. J. Hamilton, E. M. Pease, and James W. Throckmorton joined in a joint appeal to the Congress to restore Texans the civil rights guaranteed under the Federal Constitution. Discredit was thrown upon their loyalty to the nation, and the appeal was not acted upon.

The years of Carpetbagger rule were gaudy, violent, sometimes comic in retrospect, but always tragic at the time. The national view towards the era wavers with whatever view toward the American Negro minority happens to be fashionable at any given time. The regime was founded on Union bayonets and Negro votes, but evidence is small that it did either the Union or the unfortunate minority any good. Negroes put the Carpetbaggers in the state house, but with rare exceptions the ragged horde did not share the wealth.

A large number of men who were indisputably honorable actively supported this sort of rule in Texas and other states. Probably, wrapped in their own drives and biases, honorable men in the U.S. Government simply failed to see the folly of permitting the domestic wreckage in Texas. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in most respects was as blind to the cruelty, injustice, and folly committed in the name of the Reconstruction of the South as contemporary English governments were blind to the cruelties and follies of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.

The period was a weird melange of corruption and genuine social reform. Negro suffrage—combined with white disenfranchisement and wholesale fraud—produced a political revolution. Meanwhile, social and economic revolutions went on. A few years after the war, the "bottom rail was on the top," as Texans said.

Corruption was most evident in the printing and railroad bills. Davis appointed some 10,000 men to valuable offices and made the fortunes of many, but this was essentially legitimate patronage. So were the enormous increases in salary the legislators voted officeholders, and their own increase in per diem. The new governing class were poor men, without a touch of aristocratic ideal or ethic. They possessed an enormous middle-class grasp for money, and they voted themselves a raise. This was characteristic and inevitable; it would happen again. The real corruption, however, came with the $200,000 the printing bill gave the administration to spend. Radical news sheets sprouted in the state like noxious weeds.

Railroad legislation provided similar windfalls. The legislature voted the International Railroad Company twenty sections of land for each mile of track and tax exemption for twenty-five years. Similar grants were provided the Southern Transcontinental and Southern Pacific. In credit to Edmund Davis, these acts were passed over his veto, and his veto stopped several other similar bills. At the same time the state gave away its lands, enabling acts of the legislature allowed cities to vote large railroad and other bonds, totaling more than $1,000,000. These acts were in contradiction to the constitution of 1869.

In their defense, proponents of railroad legislation could point to more than 1,000 miles of new track.

Opponents saw resources of the state—more than required to subsidize the tracks—handed to corporate interests, which profited enormously. They saw a huge increase in taxes and bonded debt, which went to pay for the liberality the Radicals bestowed. Most of all, they saw legislators who had never had a dime sprouting gold watches and gold-headed canes, building or buying fine mansion houses, and driving English carriages behind blooded horses. The railroad boys and other lobbyists did spread a bit of their windfalls around.

Much Radical legislation could stand the inspection of time. The Carpetbaggers tried to build a state road system, though they never progressed beyond levying taxes to support it. They passed a homestead exemption law by which no homestead of 200 acres or less could be seized for debt, except a direct mortgage. The state school acts of 1870 and 1871 created a genuine free public school system for the first time, adequately supported by taxation. In requiring compulsory attendance of children between six and eighteen, without regard to race, the legislature was fifty years ahead of the age. In its centralization, with a state superintendent, state board of education, and 35 district supervisors, who appointed local school boards and thus removed control of education completely from the public, the Radicals were more than a century in advance of America.

Even the good things were intensely unpopular, because the regime itself was universally held in contempt.

The corruption and extravagances of the Carpetbaggers, which reflected the worst of Anglo-American politics, have been easily seen. The rise of a new mercantile and landowning class with them in Texas has not been so clearly marked. The almost complete destruction of the old planter gentry, not by the war but in its aftermath, escaped attention. But it is a truism, if not universally true, that few families that had wealth or station prior to 1860 survived the following two decades with either.

The war bankrupted the planter class by destroying its capital in money and slaves. The principal assets of the planters had always been invested in Negroes; they vanished on Juneteenth. The planters still held land, but they were unable to hold it long. Without labor, they could not put it back in production. And for several critical years the labor situation in Texas—and the whole South—remained in turmoil. The stabilization of 1866 could have saved many planters, but it was overturned. The freedmen once again came to believe they would be cared for by the Government; the Radicals made promises, though they were not kept. Millions of acres were freely granted for the development of rail lines; hardly a dollar and not an acre went to former slaves.