Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The dominant spirit was to allow the state government no real latitude to act. The powers of the legislature were much reduced. It could not incur a debt of more than $200,000, come what may. It could not impose taxes of more than fifty cents on the $100. Property could be taxed only in proportion to its value. The credit of the state was not to be lent, nor any appropriation made for private purpose—and "private" was interpreted in the Roman way. The legislature could appoint no office or commission lasting beyond two years. Finally, it had no powers to suspend habeas corpus, even under martial law.
The executive was equally, or even more, curtailed. The terms of all state officers were set at two years, though no prohibition was made against reelection. Almost all state offices were made elective; thus the power of a governor to appoint an administration was denied. The Texas governor was made one of the weakest in the United States. He was denied authority over both state and local officials; he was made, in fact, a peer among equals. The lieutenant governor, who could call up legislation in the Senate, was to be henceforth a far more powerful man. On top of this, the constitution slashed the governor's salary by 20 percent.
The governor was left awesome responsibilities but few powers, which ever afterward few of his constituents could really understand.
Judgeships, for similar reasons, were made elective, including the bench of the supreme court. No judge who had to run for reelection regularly was expected to decide cases against the popular feeling, on some newfangled point of law.
None of these changes was controversial; they were what the people wanted. One popular provision failed. This would have required a poll tax payment for voting rights. Another amendment, female suffrage, was hooted down. The real controversy in 1875 concerned the public schools. The convention went on record supporting these, but what actually emerged from committee was a compromise.
Centralization of school supervision was abolished; the state system was destroyed in favor of local systems. Compulsory school attendance was also dropped. The revenues from a $1 poll tax, and some general revenue, was earmarked for public education—the amount was to be argued bitterly for years. The public school system and new university system, however, were endowed with a vast acreage of public lands, about 42,000,000 acres. The lands originally set aside for educational endowments, which had been in fertile north-central Texas, were now exchanged for sections in the arid, still unsettled west, which were still unappropriated domain. Here the school system suffered a great, immediate loss, but one which, ironically, was to be more than made right by future discoveries of petroleum. The tenor of this legislation also revealed what was to be a continuing pattern in Texas. Huge endowments were set aside for building funds, but very little was provided for annual maintenance of the system from tax monies.
The state road system begun by the Radicals was also abolished. Personal service was resubstituted in lieu of road taxes. This was a regression, but railroads were made common carriers, following an example in other states. For many years, however, no regulation of railroads was enforced. The constitution of 1876 was in spirit and letter an instrument of the older, agrarian South, not that of an emerging industrial state. It was designed to protect the farmer and landowner, not Yankee-dominated banks and industries. Although nothing in the constitution was actually hostile to business or corporate enterprise—this came later, with the rise of Populism—in many ways it slowed and hampered industrialization and financial growth.
The emergence of Texas into the modern world was presided over by farmers, and not by businessmen. Texas was a completely agricultural region, and Texans determinedly held on to their heritage. As one Texas historian wrote:
All in all the constitution complied with public opinion quite faithfully. Biennial sessions of the legislature, low salaries, no registration requirement for voters, precinct voting, abolition of the road tax . . . a homestead exemption clause, guarantees of a low tax rate, a more economical school system, with schools under local control, a less expensive court system, popular election of officers—all these were popular measures with Texans in 1876. The constitution was a logical product of its era.
Certain other things, which were included in, or grew out of this outlook, should be mentioned. The state immigration bureau, which brought new people west, and which all agreed did useful work, was abolished because of its operating expense. Farmers did not believe in tax-supported public works, if the taxes had to be levied directly on them. This was an attitude that was to last.
Other measures eventually incorporated into Texas law grew out of this restoration, though the most severe restrictions placed on finance and industry came as a result of the long Greenback and farmers' revolts of the coming years. The banking codes, which had always been restrictive in Texas, prevented the establishment of branch banks with the exception of subsidiaries on military posts. This rule, together with the fact that in Texas no horse or homestead could be attached for private debt, nor any wage or salary garnisheed, gave farmers immense protection. But it made the rise of any really significant financial institutions impossible. Corporations as well as people could plead usury in Texas, under low legal interest rates. No industrial state ever adopted such codes.
The constitution of 1876 was also a very imperfect instrument, which required amendment at the polls for almost every conceivable change. California had a similar constitution, but there was one enormous difference between the two states: in Texas, traditionally, the great majority of proposed significant changes were regularly voted down. A lasting philosophy that no legislature or governor was to be trusted kept Texas more a popular than a representative democracy, and it kept society itself, rather than laws or government, in control. The governor had no power over county sheriffs, who were subject, naturally, to local forces; and with the legislature the governor was merely another equal among peers. Most appointive offices were outside his control. A strong, charismatic governor could have influence on the voters, but no man on earth could really govern the state.
Ironically, the governor continued to be thought of as the leader and the focus of state politics, because most Texans failed to see the true state of affairs. The clearest indication, however, was that in Texas men who preferred power to local prestige went to Washington. Traditionally, Senators became more powerful, even within the state, that the incumbent in Austin, who more often than not was a symbol of forces beyond his control.
In the 19th century, and for the first three decades of the 20th, the national government of the United States impinged less on its citizens than any in the Western world, except the Swiss. The national government, and its industrial power structure, set important national policy, but it collected almost no taxes, nor did it interfere or try to influence the citizens' daily life. It left almost all decisions affecting society to local option.
Because of this, important changes in America in this era were made by the states themselves, or not at all. The constitution, outlook, and philosophies of 1876 brought Texas into the modern world with very much the viewpoints of 1836, because in Texas these did not substantially change.
Other products of the era were as pervasive and lasting, if not so easily discerned as law.
Although Texas elections had been rough and ready in the early days, they do not seem to have been violent, or attended by wholesale fraud. After Reconstruction, they were never entirely free of either. Some lessons were learned and habits acquired too thoroughly between 1867 and 1873. The trouble to the body politic spawned these years cannot be overestimated.
The great family and factional feuds, such as the Sutton-Taylor fight and the Mason County War in which men were shot in the 20th century, were born in Reconstruction politics. Virtual wars continued in many Texas counties for years between Democratic and Republican factions, usually under different names. Old Party, New Party, Jayhawks, Blues, all packed pistols to the polls. Fraud became a fact of political life; ballot stuffing and even the theft of ballot boxes were common. Both violence and cynicism was a part of local politics. A striking characteristic of Texas politicians and leaders, almost never articulated where it might be damaging, was an underlying lack of sympathy with democracy as it was interpreted in the North. The very concept of the rule of law—as opposed to the rule of order—was secretly held in considerable contempt. Texas politics, out of the Reconstruction period, became increasingly devoted to the seizure or retention of power, devoid of any definite ideology beyond the underlying feelings of the tribal mass. This led to bitter factionalism, but also to certain political strengths. There was little confusion over goals, or how to get them.
Texans developed political leadership untrammeled by any ideological unreality, though circumscribed by local prejudices. In an increasingly one-party state, they built personal, rather than party, machines. They continued in the traditional path of American politics, in which the emphasis was not upon programs, but personal power. This power, however, because of the constitution and the public feeling, was exercised within severe bounds. A Texas politico could be ruthless during elections, amiable and reasonable in office.
Following Reconstruction, there was a pervading hostility to the North, not so much against the Northern people personally as against their instrument, the Federal apparatus. The great fear of the Strict Constructionalist Democrats—that the institutions of the South would be dismantled if it ever lost Federal control—came true. After Reconstruction, it was difficult for old-line Texans to see the Congress, the Presidency, or the Judiciary as guarantors of constitutional rights. All had combined, in Texan eyes, to enforce regional prejudices and popular passions on the state. One result was that the Northern political party, the Republicans, was virtually destroyed. The party never built an infrastructure except on Negro votes. Since the national Republican Party remained in power for many years, what grew up in Texas slowly was a Federal patronage machine. Texas Republican leaders were more interested in holding such patronage control than in reviving the horse that Davis killed. The stigma, after the Davis regime, of the Republican name was so marked
that while off and on thousands of Texans voted Republican, they invariably called themselves pure Democrats.
Almost the entire body of Conservative Republicans became official Democrats, without changing a single outlook or view. Nowhere was this more marked than in the Texas hill country, where local Republican officials invariably filed as Democrats, then and later. Pease, Hamilton, and Throckmorton led the way.
Texans returned to Washington with full respect for Northern, and Federal, power. They denied its right to regulate society except within broad parameters. But out of experience and racial memory, Texans picked up pragmatism. The clear-eyed understanding of the goal of politics, power, and the love of intrigue that Texas politics engendered from Reconstruction days, served Texas's representatives well. A long series of Democratic pragmatists, not so much orators as manipulators, gradually came to wield enormous power. Their skills were born of necessity, out of a minority position, self-protection, and a cynicism born of bitter experience. They expected that in the natural course of events Texas would get a dirty deal from the North; their common course was to see, so far as possible, that it did not. They were backroom men, because the real powers in Texas, after 1876, were always backroom men; the governor was usually something of a Judas goat.
From Colonel House to John Nance Garner, and from Majority Leader Sam Rayburn to Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, the state produced men who learned their lessons in a hard, pragmatic, unidealistic school. These men had genuine influence eventually on the national scene. They could not get Texas out of the Union, but they could and did get a lot out of the Union for it.
In all these men, and most of their constituents, there remained a basic distrust for the morality-spouting, consciously superior, pervasively powerful North. Texans had to play the Northern game, and they played it well. But they did not have to pretend it was their own, except in public.
Whenever the North renewed any kind of pressure on Texas, social or political, this hostility intensified, though it rarely provoked outright resistance.
In 1873, and lasting for many years, a natural reaction began. Far from proclaiming
mea culpa
over Secession, it became something of an honor to have been a Confederate. Sam Bell Maxey, running as an "ultra-simon-pure-secession-anti-reconstruction Democrat," was sent by the legislature to the U.S. Senate in 1874. Throckmorton, running as a former brigadier, was sent to the House. He might have been elected governor, but in Congress Throckmorton voted too much like the Whig he once had been. Oran Roberts, the 1861 radical secessionist, now known as "The Old Alcalde," became governor in 1879. It was next to impossible to be elected to anything, unless the candidate had worn the gray.
However, the old South in Texas was dead. Ex-Confederates could be sent to Congress, but the plantation system, and the planters, could not be restored. A new system of agriculture now dominated the eastern regions of Texas, though in the west the family farm still prevailed. The new system was called sharecropping.
Sharecropping was less efficient than plantation agriculture, but it was a logical compromise with Emancipation. It was technically a form of tenantry, by which the man who worked the soil, in small plots, received somewhere between one-half and one-third its yield. Landowners, now mostly new men, provided seed, implements, and even housing to their tenants. The system, widespread by 1870, worked, but it had its flaws. The "deducts" as they were called, ate up large chunks of the tenants' shares; employers kept the books. The tenants, who were predominately Negro but included many whites, were in no sense free farmers, but took on the coloration of a peon class.