Lone Star (22 page)

If the lawyers were invaluable to the organic continuance of the community, and essential once the West began to enter the Union as states, they also aroused antagonisms. The frontiersman had needed no legal talent to face the requirements of his existence. The lawyers brought social history and familiarity with the concepts of Anglo-Saxon law and justice. But they also carried along land titles, lawsuits, and a whole frightening bag of tricks that frequently dissolved the frontiersman's possession of his blood-won ground. Noticeably, in the folklore of both the old and the later West, the lawyer, like the banker, is rarely cast as hero. The small farmer and pioneer detested the orator who could neither plow nor fight Indians, who inevitably dominated political offices, and who invariably sided with the most-propertied class.

The merchant came closest, in modern social parlance, to being a class enemy to the farmer. The merchant made possible the arrival of goods and the rise of comfort on the frontier and filled a very necessary void, but the antagonism of a people who never quite had enough money to buy is understandable. The feeling was more psychological than political.

All of these inheritors of the old frontier were perhaps envied, but not disliked for their material success. The functional Anglo-America of the West already had a great respect for, and mythology about, material success. It was perfectly proper to build two-story brick houses; the real tension between planter and dirt farmer was the former's pretensions to social class. In a Puritan ethos there was no real place for the role of the gentleman. What emerged was a sort of uneasy compromise. The planter adopted, quietly, his pretensions to gentility; the strongly puritanical majority of the country studiously ignored the pretensions, and only became furious if they were flaunted in their faces.

The planter, however, was not so much a gentleman as a working capitalist. He bought land, raised cash crops, and with the surplus quickly produced, invested in more land, to the extent of his luck, ability, and desire. The blot on this successful agriculture was the planter's employment of and dependence on Negro slaves. Strangely, by the turn of the 19th century human slavery was firmly imbedded across what was one of the most egalitarian areas of earth. The frontierspeople who went west both above and below the Ohio were initially very much the same. But slavery, and the quick imposition of a capitalist plantation economy in the South, created very different societies. The first prosperity, on the surface, was won handily by the South, which was soon a surplus-producing region, with a viable upper class. But the Northwest Territory had two advantages. The Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery, and its climate was unsuited for the then richest cash crops. The old Northwest Territory was to be spared the social residue of Negro slavery for almost two hundred years.

Slavery eroded certain values on the formerly free frontier. It also produced race hatred. The frontiersmen disliked human slavery both in theory and practice, and it took no great effort to extend this feeling to the slaves, with whom they were hard put to compete. When the first planter in a new community came to a cooperative house- or barn-raising, and watched while his "niggers" sweated shoulder to shoulder with a throng of poorer whites, a stain was thrown over the whole frontier. The free farmers disliked planters, but hated Negroes, somewhat illogically fixing the victims with the system's blame. Negroes were hated next to Indians, because the frontiersmen found it harder to hate people that they much more despised. The Indian seemed to have some admirable qualities; the unfortunate black, to white frontiersmen, had none.

Except for the institution of slavery, the rising gentry on the border South would have been unable to establish caste. They were not, and never would have been, an aristocracy in the European sense. They might be mainly Episcopalian, but they were not free from the Calvinistic pressure of cause and effect. Theodore Roosevelt's description of this class is significant, in a way he himself, a conscious member of the old American gentry, probably never understood:

Their inheritance of sturdy and self-reliant manhood helped them greatly; their blood told in their favor as blood generally does tell when other things are equal. If they prized intellect they prized character more; they were strong in body and mind, stout of heart, and resolute of will. They felt that pride of race which spurs a man to effort, instead of making him feel he is excused from effort. They realized that the qualities they inherited from their forefathers ought to be further developed by them as their forefathers originally developed theirs. They knew that their blood and breeding, though making it probable that they would with proper effort succeed, yet entitled them to no success which they could not fairly earn in open contest with their rivals.

The planters of Kentucky and Tennessee were, like the rest of Americans, a driven class; they concerned themselves with matters such as success, which no true aristocrat would understand. Under Roosevelt's biases, the truth comes through. These were whiskey-drinking Puritans, as deeply imbued with the American ethic as the hard-nosed, farming middle class.

The Southern frontier, then, like a vast horde of jungle ants, moved inexorably toward the Mississippi. There was order in the seemingly chaotic march. And, common to all English-speaking societies, there was something of the anthill in its industriousness, its internal order, and its individual discipline, which differed from those of the American North only in slight degree. Nowhere was there anything of the stubborn mysticism of the Spaniard, or the individualism of the French, both of which required imposed restraint. The Anglo-Saxon built his own prisons and lived in them cheerfully.

First came a swarm of free frontiersmen, more belligerent and daring than ambitious. They were followed by a larger swarm, narrow-minded in its economic preoccupation, but industrious. Finally, there arrived a growing class that styled itself as an elite. This class stamped manners, thought, and custom, but otherwise hardly impinged upon the others. Meanwhile, the frontier experience threw these separate ethnic and social components together, making one common people out of many.

A permanent, and lasting, single people was created along the Southern frontier, out of shared experience and a sense of common destiny. A true nation was made. Unfortunately, as history unfolded in other parts of the Anglo-American continent, this Southern frontier was to become something of a nation within a larger nation. All Americans did not share its outlook and experience. The great majority of people never left the East while there was a frontier, and other millions, by coming late, avoided the struggle for the continent altogether.

It was no part of their history; they took little pride in it, and were never influenced by the sense of race, blood, and common soil it engendered.

An American historian in the 19th century described the frontier vanguard in the following words:

Thus the backwoodsmen lived on the clearings they had hewed out of the everlasting forest; a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their hearts' core. Their lives were harsh and narrow; they gained their bread by their blood and sweat, in the unending struggle with the wild ruggedness of nature. They suffered terrible injuries at the hands of the red men, and on their foes they waged a terrible warfare in return. They were relentless, revengeful, suspicious, knowing neither ruth nor pity; they were also upright, resolute, and fearless, loyal to their friends, and devoted to their country. In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers.

The Anglo-American 18th-century frontier, like that of the Spanish, was one of war. The word "Texan" was not yet part of the English language. But in the bloody hills of Kentucky and on the middle border of Tennessee the type of man was already made.

Chapter 8

THE FILIBUSTERS

In 1806, the only towns . . . as were San Antonio, numbering about 2,000 inhabitants, Goliad with perhaps 1,400, and Nacogdoches with nearly 500. In spite of the dangers that constantly threatened them, many excellent American families had settled near Nacogdoches, and these, with the officers in the Mexican army, formed the higher circles of society. Elaborate dinner-parties were given, at which the conversation was bright and sparkling, the toast-speeches witty and eloquent: toasts were always given to the King of Spain and the President of the United States. In San Antonio lived many descendants of aristocratic Spanish families; the army officers were generally men of polished manners, as they often came from the Viceregal Court of Mexico; the priests were men of learning and refinement. The governor made frequent receptions, while each night on the public square the people met to dance, to converse, to promenade, and to visit. Captain Pike, who (in 1805–6) was sent out by our government on an exploring tour, reported San Antonio to be one of the most delightful places in the Spanish colonies.

ANNA J. HARDWICKE PENNYBACKER,
 

in
A History Of Texas For Schools
, 1895

TO Spanish officers holding the west side of the Mississippi, the vision of this cold, dry, graceless, and restlessly aggressive race helping themselves to the continent was frightening. There was a historic antagonism between the Hispanic and the English-speaking worlds, rooted in the collapse of the Middle Ages. The Puritan frontiersmen still told tales of the Spanish Inquisition and thought of the King of Spain as the archtyrant; Charles III's officials were appalled at the energy and the Mammonite tendency to what they called "piracy" of the Anglo-Saxon horde.
Anglosajón
, in Spanish, had always a pejorative connotation, standing at best for men without manners, and at worst for rapists and looters.

The French dream of North American empire was exploded in the gunsmoke at Quebec, but Spain had inherited France's superb strategic position athwart the Mississippi. The red and gold of Leon and Castile flew over New Orleans, and Spanish cannon dominated the river. In this era before rails or efficient land transport, Spain controlled all inner America's outlet to the sea. But Spain suffered from the same deadly weakness that made the French presence in the Ohio country ephemeral. Spain ruled only some 20,000 Europeans in the entire Louisiana Territory, and most of these were Canadian French.

A few cannon and a few thousand French-speaking subjects did not make Spanish power secure. There were no troops, or even the will, in metropolitan Spain to keep a firm grasp on this outpost of empire. Spain's legal title to Louisiana was recognized by all powers, but as Spanish colonial officials well knew, history rarely turned on legality alone.

Don Francisco Bouligny, a Spanish officer commanding in Upper Louisiana, or Missouri, was the first official to recommend a rather dangerous step: to fight the Anglo-Saxon population increase by trying to incorporate it within the borders of Spain. In 1776, Bouligny recommended that immigration be opened to Anglo-Americans who were willing to change citizenship. He saw that Boonesboro and other settlements in Kentucky were now firmly fixed, and there was even an English-speaking outpost on the river, at Manchac. If the east bank became solidly English, Bouligny argued, the English would eventually dominate the country. His purpose was to suck all new settlement west of the river, under the Spanish flag. Spain would have to allow freedom from restriction and give liberal grants of land. The price the immigrants would have to pay would be loyalty to Spain.

The ethnic homogeneity of the empire had already been broken, with the incorporation of thousands of ethnic French. Most of these had made loyal subjects. Bouligny proposed that English-speaking Roman Catholics be given land grants. The law of Spain required all citizens to be Catholic and permitted no other form of worship. Bouligny's first proposal was that only Catholic Englishmen should be admitted freely, and supplied with Irish curates in the pay of the Crown.

Whatever the supply of Irish priests, however, the stumbling block was that there were no Roman Catholic Anglo-Saxons on the Mississippi frontier. In fact, there were only about 30,000 English-speaking Catholics in all British America, and none of these were in the West or could be induced to go there. Bouligny now went further: he wrote that immigration should be opened to "any individual, whatever his nation, especially if he comes with his family and his negroes." He ignored the delicate question of religion. However, Governor Gálvez understood and agreed. Louisiana officials had no power to change the law, but to create a viable community of immigrants they would have to ignore it. This, carefully never put in writing, they agreed to do. Unknown to most Anglo-Americans, or for that matter even to their own countrymen, many Spanish officials were themselves in violation of the law. They were freethinkers, or at least, Freemasons.

The American Revolution threw a stream of refugees, mostly Tories, across the Mississippi. Some even built a town along the Amité River. These people were not molested by Spanish soldiers, and, in 1779, Gálvez even paid them an official, friendly visit. When it was apparent that the United States had won its independence, most of them took the oath of allegiance to the King of Spain. In 1783, Gálvez was able to secure a Royal edict that all refugees into His Most Catholic Majesty's dominions should enjoy the right to stay. Many did.