Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Negroes who were being organized by Democrats were threatened with death by the Loyal League. Democrats rode into Negro settlements and gun on hip ordered blacks to stay away from the polls. There was terror, intimidation, and some murders on both sides. White men in some counties pulled guns on Davis officials conducting the polls. Unregistered whites and boys years under the legal age were voted. Desperadoes, thieves, planters, sweaty farmers, and ministers of the gospel damned black Republican rule and voted Democrat. Coke won, by more than two to one.
The great drama was not yet over. Davis, now claiming an irregularity in the election laws, tried to invalidate the result in the state supreme court.
This was a conspiracy to set aside the election. E. J. Davis himself had proposed the Texas election codes and signed them into law; the test case that the Radicals presented to the courts was planned before the election was held. The state supreme court was Davis-appointed. On January 5, 1874, the court declared the election law was unconstitutional, and that the results of the December balloting were invalid. This ruling would have prevented Democrats from assuming almost every office in the state, because the Democrats had won them all.
The supreme court's order was not resisted—it was ignored. In January, all over Texas the newly elected officials went to their offices and took them over. In some areas, ominous crowds gathered behind them. Although Davis issued a proclamation forbidding the new officials to act, or the new fourteenth legislature to sit, there was no one to enforce either order. Public offices changed hands. The people accepted the new officers and obeyed them.
Meanwhile, the new legislature and many prominent Texans moved on Austin. The San Antonio
Herald
expressed the dominant mood: "If Texas is a State, and if her citizens are men, Coke will be inaugurated, and the Fourteenth Legislature will sit."
Davis and his coterie were determined not to give up power. The governor played his trump card—he wired the President of the United States for military assistance to "apprehend violence and put down insurrection." In very similar circumstances in Louisiana, Grant had set aside a Democratic triumph, and
Davis apparently had every confidence this would happen again.
A concurrent drama was acted out in Washington. The Texas Congressmen, Hancock and Giddings, saw the President. They showed him copies of the state constitution and the election law. Grant read these carefully, then remarked that the proper time to have disputed them in court was before, not after, the elections. Grant did not attempt to rule on the legal aspects, but he gave every indication he sniffed a rat. He told the Texans he would not send Federal troops.
Later on the same day, January 12, 1874, Senator J. W. Flanagan had an audience with the President. Flanagan made a strong effort to persuade Grant to go to Davis's aid. Grant said two things that were very significant: he did not want another Louisiana fiasco, where the Federal government had overturned an election with bayonets, and he had to think of the Congressional elections this year. The country as a whole was tired of the military occupation in the South. With some asperity, the President told Flanagan that Davis had been decisively beaten and the time had come "for him to get out of the way."
Flanagan then wired certain friends in Austin to "withdraw." The game was up.
Grant wired Davis also: ". . . The call [for troops] is not made in accordance with the Constitution of the United States . . . would it not be prudent, as well as right, to yield to the verdict of the people as expressed by their ballots?" As a Northern historian expressed it, Grant and the North were not prepared to refight the Civil War.
Davis did not accede. Now, in Texas, a dangerous situation was brewing. Richard Coke, the Confederate veteran, conferred with men he knew and trusted about taking over the state government peaceably. These men were Generals Henry McCulloch and Hardeman; the sheriff of Travis County, Zimpleman; and Colonel John S. Ford. Coke wanted these former officers, who were local heroes, to try to control the public. He intended to be inaugurated; he intended the new legislature to convene, and he expected Davis to use force to prevent this. All the Texans agreed that Davis would try to use an outbreak of fighting as an excuse for Yankee intervention. They agreed to move quietly and peacefully. At this time, they did not know of Grant's wire to Davis.
Acting quickly, armed citizens acting for Coke took possession of the legislative chambers in the Capitol building. They repelled an attempt of Radicals to enter by force. Police acting under Davis's orders and parties of armed Radicals gathered in the Capitol basement. Austin had divided into two armed camps, with the old and new governors, and both the fourteenth legislature and a rump of the old thirteenth claiming to be the legal regime.
On January 15, groups of Negroes from the country further down the Colorado River entered Austin. Davis's Adjutant General armed these newcomers with rifles from the state arsenal.
It appeared that bloodshed was inevitable.
One Major Russell, from the staff of General Augur, commander of the U.S. Army Department of Texas, arrived in the capital. A rumor spread among Coke's people that Russell had told Davis the general had instructions from the President to declare Federal martial law. All believed that Davis intended to provoke violence. But despite some very delicate incidents, Coke kept control. His officers, who more and more resembled a convention of Confederate survivors, kept the populace quiet. At one point some Radicals, under a Carpetbagger Union officer named De Gress, aimed a cannon at the Capitol. But Coke's men had spiked it earlier, and hugely enjoyed the frustration of Davis's men.
The Governor ordered out the local militia, called the Travis Rifles, only to see the company, surrounded by citizens led by Sheriff Zimpleman, go over to the other side. Davis apparently could not understand the changed temper of the North or realize that the great experiment in Texas was over. He telegraphed the President again, for troops.
Grant did not deign to reply personally. His answer came through the Attorney General of the United States: ". . . Your right to the office of the Governor at this time is at least so doubtful, that he does not feel warranted in furnishing United States troops to aid you in holding further possession of it."
Governor Davis now had the choice of starting a war to hold his office against impossible odds, with no help in prospect from his Northern friends, or of surrender. He felt that Grant had virtually ordered him to surrender. His organ, the
Daily State Journal
, expressed Radical feelings in a bitter sentence: "The courts are powerless; the government of the state has been forcibly usurped, and President Grant has backed the usurpation."
From his office he could see the stacked arms of Texas militia—stacked against him. Old Rip Ford, tall, grim, still ruddy-faced and handsome at sixty, was marching toward the Capitol at the head of an armed, angry, but disciplined body of men. They were singing "The Yellow Rose of Texas" in a mighty roar.
Davis surrendered. He vacated his offices on Monday, January 19, 1874. He did not present Coke with a key, but that did not stop the ebullient Texans. On the orders of a state senator from east Texas, the door was broken down, and Richard Coke went in. The secretary of state, a die-hard Unionist, was ousted from his desk.
The militia paraded with music to the Capitol, where a salute of 102 guns was fired. The legislature passed a resolution thanking President U.S. Grant for his decision. Coke and his lieutenant governor, Hubbard, addressed a deliriously happy throng from the Capitol steps.
The first phase of the Civil War in Texas was over. The next phase was to last at least a hundred years.
Chapter 23
THE RESTORATION
He [President Grant] says he opposed the Fifteenth Amendment and thinks it was a mistake, that it had done the Negro no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a political advantage to the North.
ENTRY IN THE DIARY OF SECRETARY OF STATE HAMILTON FISH, DATED JANUARY 17, 1877
IN January 1874, Richard Coke and his band of joyous Democrats at last had control of the never-again-quite-so-sovereign state of Texas. Their euphoria was to be short. They had inherited not the whirlwind but what the long storm had left behind. The state was ruined economically; only now had cotton production reached what it had been in 1860—500,000 bales. These losses could be restored. There was political, judicial, and social damage no one could repair.
The next few years must be interpreted not according to later views but in the light of the foregoing fifteen years. Texans now began a long, detailed, and exhaustive program that was nothing short of a rebellion against government itself. If between 1874 and 1876 Texas turned its back on much of the 19th century, the great majority of Texans had seen little in the postwar world to admire. They had acquired an abiding prejudice against centralized government of the state and against the powers of government at any level. Government had done them nothing good.
The state was disastrously in debt. The Carpetbaggers collected $4,0000,000 in taxes, but borrowed $3,000,000 more. Coke found current receipts in 1874 would cover only half the programmed expense. To make things worse, the national panic of 1873 now hit Texas hard. Texas could take one of two courses: try to prop up the present system by finding new funds, in a country where industry and commerce hardly existed and land prices were falling, or simply call a halt to it all.
They chose to wield a radical knife.
State expenditures were slashed, without mercy. Salaries were cut, the school funds stopped, although both measures caused considerable anguish. However, history had shown that compromise in such a program was fatal; expenditures could only be reduced if the frame of mind that produced them was changed.
No way to reduce costs was ignored. The state prison system was made self-supporting, by leasing out convict labor to private employers. This caused hideous abuse, and doubled the convict death rate, and was finally abolished in 1883. But for some years money was saved. Pensions, to Revolution veterans, were no longer paid in money but in grants of public land. A hundred other economies were introduced. These economies not only began to balance the budget, they dismantled government as a side-effect. The state treasury was able to go on a cash basis in 1879. By this time, too, conditions had eased. Cotton production had grown rapidly, and cattle money was bringing gold and silver to the state.
Public parsimony, however, was popular over-all. The basic reason was simple: Texas was an agrarian state, and now the government was again in the hands of farmers. However much small farmers believed in education, pensions, or adequate public salaries, the taxes fell on them and their land.
While the legislature sliced away at costs, it took up other problems. Foremost was the restoration of law and order, followed by replacement of the constitution of 1869. The Texas Rangers were brought back; there would never again be any organization in Texas called a "state police." The Frontier Battalion was organized. Between 1874 and 1880, both on the Indian and Mexican borders, the Rangers had their great days and were a spectacular success. Both Indians and internal anarchy disappeared. Order was restored first, then law.
The judiciary had to be dismantled. The terms of the Davis-appointed courts were closed. Oran M. Roberts became Chief Justice, presiding over a new bench. Further, the legislature removed most of the Republican district judges around the state.
Delegates to a constitutional convention assembled in 1875. Not one man who had written the constitution of 1869 sat in this delegation. The convention was composed almost entirely of old Texans: John Henry Brown, Sterling C. Robertson, son of the empresario, Rip Ford, John H. Reagan (ex–Postmaster General of the Confederacy), and a bevy of generals who had worn the gray. Of the ninety members, more than twenty had held high rank in the C.S.A. This was a restoration convention.
There were forty-one farmers, twenty-nine lawyers, seventy-five Democrats, and fifteen Republicans, six of whom were Negro. Congressman W. P. McLean sounded the keynote of the day: "If future State Governments prove burdensome and onerous, it ought not to be the fault of this Convention."
The document rewritten at this convention made it almost impossible for government in Texas to be burdensome or onerous in the future. It was a landowners' group, including forty members of the Grange. Its first act was to reduce its own per diem allowance to five dollars. Its second was to vote down a motion to have proceedings printed, because a public stenographer cost ten dollars a day. Then it proceeded to write what was to remain the fundamental law of Texas for the next one hundred years.
This was an antigovernment instrument; too many Texans had seen what government could do, not for them but to them. It tore up previous frameworks, and its essential aim was to try to bind all state government within very tight confines. The bicameral legislature was continued—thirty-one senators and not more than 150 representatives—but the term of senators was reduced, requiring election every four years. Biennial sessions replaced the annual assemblies under the instrument of 1869. This was done, as one Texan said, not only to save money, "But the more the damn legislature meets, the more Goddamned bills and taxes it passes!"