Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Thousands of poor whites were pushed into tenantry in these years. The Negroes had no other choice. The Federal government freed them in 1865; but in the era when Congress supplied forty millions in railroad subsidies, it could not find ten to provide the freedmen land. The Negro could not compete in white society, even had the white middle classes been willing to let him. He had no money; he could not procure credit; he could not, in most cases, read or write. There was no way the freedmen could enter the American money economy. They passed back into the peculiarly Texas form of peonage, which spread across much of the South; it was that, or starve. Ironically, some fared worse than before, because the old paternalism of the planter class was gone. A savage, but not untrue, saying was that the former slaves had gone from the status of prized animals to that of range beeves, given a plot and allowed to forage for themselves.
The net effect of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in Texas was to disenfranchise Negroes and impose caste.
The implementation of the Amendments in the state was disastrous. This indicated that American political wisdom stopped short of understanding problems of ethnic differentiation, status, and class. Both Amendments—giving the freedmen civil rights as citizens and the franchise—might have been accepted had they been implemented everywhere equally, and had they not been imposed as punishment on what was thought to be an "arrogant, rebel, slavacratic class." The Northern leaders—though the evidence was clear enough in their own backyards—did not understand that the opposition to Negro equality was not from former slaveowners but from the whole broad spectrum of the white farming mass. Men who worked with their hands instinctively feared Negroes more than aristocrats. To couple Negro suffrage with white disenfranchisement can only be described as blindness, unless military rule was to be imposed on the South for at least a generation. Reform was possible. But the North forced a too-visible revolution, then found it never believed in forcing the revolution in the first place.
Rather surprisingly, because they were human, the former slaves behaved with reasonable decorum and good sense in the Reconstruction years. The situations that became utterly intolerable to whites—the Negro police, the Negro senators, the Negro soldiery quartered on their towns—were all brought about not by Negroes but by Southern Scalawags and Northern Caucasians. The state senator with whip scars on his back, now in waistcoat and high silk hat, and with Radicals fawning in his ear, understandably showed a childlike vanity, insolence, and fiscal irresponsibility. The State Policeman who went berserk had an impossible job; no police force can uphold the law if it is completely devoid of public respect. What was overlooked was that the pistols, badges, and senatorial bribes and watch chains were all handed to Negroes by whites, not to help the race but for partisan gain. The moral pigsties in Texas between 1867 and 1874 were made entirely by whites, but the Negroes were made to pay for them.
Corruption was identified even in the North with Negro suffrage. The New York
Tribune
, a former Abolitionist organ, printed that while Negroes had been allowed "to develop their latent capacities," they proved that "as a race they are idle, ignorant, and vicious." A hundred Northern leaders, from Grant down, said the same.
There was no love for the Negro in Texas in 1860, but Davis's use of Negro State Police made hatred of the race not only popular but patriotic. A white man who publicly abused a Negro in 1860 was regarded by men of good taste as a sort of swine. A few years later, there were decent men and women who willingly closed their ears to Negro screams.
First the new-citizen Negro was forced back on the farm, then he had to be circumscribed by caste. Citizenship had been conferred by fiat, but it was not likely to work; it had no American currency in use and wont. Readjustment was ticklish and painful for both black and white. The slave had known the code; now the freedman had to learn the limits of his "place." It would have been far healthier for all Americans, including the blacks, if they had understood that the imposition of caste was an almost inevitable human reaction, which had taken place many times before. Americans were human; the 18th-century manifestos and the 19th-century amendments could not change basic instincts in the human race. The white Texan was neither sadistic nor cruel in the main, nor had he any intention of destroying the black race. He did want domination, whether he could logically rationalize this or not.
What happened to the Negro was inevitable, once the North muddied the waters, then beat a strategic retreat. Still, establishing the caste system took thirty years. It was not consolidated at once; Negroes in Texas continued for some years to vote. Not until the new "black codes" and signs went up in the 1890s and early 1900s was the transformation complete.
The Northern retreat was as much political as emotional. Northern Democrats, eager to renew old alliances after Emancipation, studiously never brought up the question of Negro rights for almost seventy years. The Republican business and political community lost interest, after the first full glimpse of their Southern monster child. By then, they no longer needed the South, anyway.
As always in America, the full retreat from the great crusade of 1861–69 had to be rationalized by the courts. During the 1870s the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, made the actual state of affairs constitutionally palatable by emasculating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The escape clause was simple: neither amendment put the rights granted by it under Federal protection or jurisdiction. The decisions were accepted with cynical amusement by educated Texans, and with righteous joy by others. The way was open for Texas and other states to bar the Negro from civil rights and suffrage by a number of devious, ingenious, and effective ways, ranging from economic pressures to the poll tax and grandfather clause.
The great irony of Reconstruction was that it was so unnecessary. It settled nothing that had not already been settled in 1865.
There was a great and not glorious alteration in the lighting of the United States' broad Southern tier after 1850. This is reflected by far more than the physical destruction and psychic damage visited upon the South. Books of fiction and nonfiction dealing with Texas, for example, have only sold widely when covering the events up to 1845. High noon, in this part of America, is instinctively understood to be long arrived and passed, though no one has ever quite dared say so. The towns, the rivers, and long-galleried houses remained, but even the ghost of a Greek-styled democracy in America was dead. The Thermopylae of the Alamo somehow became lost in the gunsmoke fogs of Palmito Hill.
In the last days of 1860 a Southern orator tried to picture Americans of the year 2000:
Extending their empire across this continent to the Pacific, and down through Mexico to the other side of the great gulf, and over the isles of the sea, they established an empire and wrought a civilization which has never been equalled or surpassed—a civilization teeming with orators, poets, philosophers, statesmen, and historians equal to those of Greece or Rome—and presented to the world the glorious spectacle of a free, prosperous, and illustrious people.
There was much that was brutal, unlovely, illusionary and even ridiculous to that dream. But against the actual reality of the next century, it might well stand. Most ages see themselves as perfect, or striving for perfection, and rarely see their real flaws in time.
Whatever dream had made Texas the fastest-growing state, whatever fascination pulled men to the silvery Rio Grande, ended. From a hundred dusty, brooding, straggling little towns in the woods and prairies of eastern Texas, some vital element disappeared. Cotton still piled high on the wharves; steamboats still hooted on the water. But the ghost of that dream was all that was left, preserved in iron or bronze, gazing gloomily down from a hundred courthouse statues of Lee's soldiers or gleaming frostily in moonlight on memorials to the Confederate dead.
Part V
UNTIL DAY BREAKS AND DARKNESS DISAPPEARS:
THE LAST FRONTIER
Chapter 24
RED NIGGERS, RED VERMIN
We have set up our lodges in these groves and swung our children from these boughs from time immemorial. When the game beats away from us, we pull down our lodges and move away, leaving no trace to frighten it, and in a while it comes back. But the white man comes and cuts down the trees, building houses and fences and the buffaloes get frightened and leave and never come back, and the Indians are left to starve. . . .
MUGUARA, CHIEF OF THE PENATEKA COMANCHES, TO THE TEXANS
The same sequence of events has occurred repeatedly in man's history; an invader with superior cultural equipment supplants and replaces a technologically inferior group. If the inferior culture survives it frequently does so in the marginal areas not coveted by the invader.
W. W. NEWCOMB, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
FOLLOWING Pontiac's great rebellion in 1763, the British Ministry ruling North America tried to strike some kind of balance between the new colonists and the old, the white man and the red. There was a serious problem in America, bloodiest then in Pennsylvania, centered on the struggle between Amerind and advancing Scotch-Irish Protestants across the western hills. The British government attempted to form a line of demarcation between European settlement and Indian hunting grounds. Borders were drawn, boundaries surveyed, and treaties signed by 1768.
One year later Daniel Boone blazed his fateful Kentucky trail. Here began the last, great bloody collision between the aborigines and new invaders, a brutal and brutalizing contest that was to last more than a hundred years. The struggle was to reach its climax on the windswept Plains. More blood would be shed in Texas than in any other place.
The pattern of this conflict was locked in place in the 18th century. The British government drew a line of demarcation; it could not enforce it. The British recognized certain Indian rights; it begrudged the 12,000 pounds annual cost of honoring them. The British government pledged protection for both white settler and Indian tribe; it failed them both. Lord Shelburne, believing that English expansion across the Alleghenies must inevitably expand British trade, agreed to the Indian treaties arranged by Superintendents Sir William Johnson and John Stuart with hypocrisy in his heart. When Washington replaced Whitehall, nothing changed. Treaty followed treaty; the temporary absences of war between the races were mistakenly called peace; and each new treaty or line of demarcation between red and white was merely a deferred death warrant for the Amerind.
It was inevitably so. To confirm the Indians in possession would have required the vast continent to be set aside "as a game preserve for squalid savages," in Theodore Roosevelt's words. This was asking too much of human nature. There was some such sentiment in the older-settled, status-quo-minded East, which was more rational and less imperial. But the newer West was
democratic and characteristically aggressive; it formed a pressure group that could not be denied.
The Westerners' view of Indians as natural obstacles to progress, vermin rather than human, became the dominant American one. The courts, as always, eventually upheld the dominant view, in making the Indian a tenant at the white man's will.
Because the North American Indians were aboriginal, the normal patterns of human conquest—slavery or serfdom, the imposition of caste, or miscegenation—could not be workably applied. The white's way of developing the land destroyed it for the hunting Indian's use. The tribesmen, whose culture was profoundly different from the European, would neither subordinate nor adapt. The refusal was psychological, willful, and valiant, but it destroyed the Indian with his habitat; in comparison, the subordinated and transplanted Negro actually grew in numbers and thrived.
The Amerind would have been eliminated in any case, but how to do this remained a fundamental American problem for generations. American governments did try to afford both the tribesmen and the frontiersmen some protection but invariably failed them both. Because the United States was democratic and ruled by pressure groups, its government was never able to dictate to the Western whites or stop their advance along certain lines. Because America was antimilitarist in spirit, it never provided a proper army to police its ragged, bleeding frontier. Because American statesmen were fundamental hypocrites toward the basic drives of war and conquest in their own people, they perpetually lit the conference fires and proposed useless treaties for both sides. In the end the Amerind was nearly exterminated, but national policy forced the frontier whites to become deeply brutalized in the process.
In both Kentucky and Texas, for long years national policy let the Indians and white settlers fight it out. A stronger government would have made efforts to tidy up the bloody mess, and avoided the double trauma that hypocrisy and violence caused in the North American soul.
Nowhere was the frontier violence in America so bloody, or so protracted, as on the soil of Texas. If Kentucky was the key, Texas was the culmination of the inner American experience. For forty years, frontier defense was Texas's most crucial problem, and frontier warfare continued for four decades.