Lone Star (78 page)

Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the state with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by. A certain sense of history, which is more the remembrance of humiliations and defeats than recollected glories, entered the Texan soul, in a way non-Southern Americans never understood. Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as "right." They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texas saying, "If Goliath had been a Yankee, little David would have lost," expressed more than a thousand words.

The Texans were stubborn and prideful people; they consciously thought of themselves as a powerful, conquering race. Their ancestors had beaten the British and defied the world. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Now, they were the conquered. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm that the war had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy, too.

The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The state was placed under military rule. Army tribunals replaced the civil courts—not without some justice, since no Union man or Negro could hope for fairness from a Texas jury. Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. The great majority of commanders acted reasonably and kept their troops within bounds. A significant number did not. More galling than the actual atrocities, however, was the fact that many Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.

The great majority of the high-minded young men from Massachusetts or Illinois who had saved the Union went home; few idealists, in any age, seek occupation duty.

This was one of the great tragedies of the era. The North was superbly equipped to win the conflict; it was poorly prepared to usher in the peace. Thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of resistance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.

Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town. No soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville. Men who were, or posed, as Union sympathizers could get almost any favor from the occupation forces. Men who were known Confederates, which included 90 percent of the population and all its local leadership, were frequently humiliated publicly, if they came hat in hand to beg some favor of the occupying army.

None of this was historically unusual in the aftermath of war; in all fairness, few occupying armies ever stayed within such bounds. There was almost no looting of private property, and few executions for any reason. But this kind of thing had not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts, and suspicions along with psychic damage in the native Texan soul.

With Granger's Juneteenth proclamation the slaves were free. The total slave population of the state had increased by 35 percent during the war; thousands of blacks had been sent south by worried owners in Louisiana and Arkansas. Now, more than 200,000 Negroes were cast adrift in one of the greatest social revolutions of all time. The first instinct of the plantation slave was to pick up and go. But he had nowhere to go. Thousands jammed the roads and trails, wandering from county to county, finally thronging into the settlements where the Freedmen's Bureau offices were being set up. This Bureau, created by the Federal Congress in March 1865, was given control of all Negro affairs. It set up its own tribunals and courts, and even attempted a system of Negro schools. In the first months the Bureau was honest; it tried to assist and protect the freedmen. However, since it interfered between former slaves and former masters, it was fiercely resented by whites.

Slaves were eager to test the limits of their new freedom. They were naturally euphoric, and expected to be led into some new Promised Land. But nothing like a red dawn appeared in the state, or in the South. The slaves made no attempt at reprisal for past wrongs, but they did refuse to work under new terms or to obey orders. They left the land, and thousands of plantation acres fell into disrepair and disuse. Somewhere, a joyful but tragic rumor started that every freedman was to get forty acres and a mule. Bureau officers tried to dispel this notion, but for many months with limited success.

In July 1865, A. J. Hamilton, a former Texas Congressman who had stood with the Union, returned with a Presidential appointment as Provisional Governor. Jack Hamilton was an honest, deeply conservative man. He had no rancor or hatred for his state, and his entire purpose was to bring it back peacefully into the Union.

Hamilton appointed Unionists to office so far as he was able. James H. Bell, a former supreme court justice, was made Secretary of State, William Alexander appointed Attorney General. But Hamilton could not find enough qualified Unionists to go around, and he hesitated to appoint hacks for purely ideological or political reasons. He declared a general amnesty for any Texan who would take a new oath of allegiance to the United States, and he began to appoint men he personally knew to be honorable and capable as local officials. Hamilton had little power, however, to interfere with the military, which was a law unto itself; and he did not try to set aside the military courts.

At this time, Texas was under Presidential Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson had set only three conditions for the reentry of the state into the Union with full self-government. These were the abolition of slavery by law, the repudiation of the secession ordinance of 1861, and the repudiation of all Confederate debts and obligations. This was a wise and farsighted policy, containing nothing of vengeance in it. Nor was there anything in it that Texans could not immediately accept. It would have restored the Union as it had been in 1861, with two essential changes: the discrediting of the right of secession and of chattel slavery for all time.

This was essentially the Lincolnian policy toward the South. Abraham Lincoln had gradually assumed tribunician powers to preserve the Union after 1861. He expanded the powers of the Presidency, which in reality meant he had prevented the Congress from participating in policy-making during the war. Whatever damage this did to traditional American representative democracy, few things better stood the inspection of history. Lincoln did not succumb to the current Northern malaise of crusade. He saw his mission as that of restoring the American people, not further dividing them. He did not see the war as holy, or himself as an avenging angel. At his last Cabinet meeting, he "thought it provident that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned and there were none of the disturbing elements of that body to hinder and embarrass us. If we were wise and discreet we should reanimate the states and get their governments in successful operation with order prevailing and the union recreated before Congress came together in December." Lincoln was not Caesar, nor was he hostile to the Republican Congress. But he knew that radicalism and a punitive spirit were rising in the North, and he feared them.

Abraham Lincoln's profession of malice toward none appalled the majority of his political associates. To eschew the winy fruits of total victory after a crusade that left 300,000 Union dead required more humanity and folk wisdom than most Americans possessed. Probably, had he lived, Lincoln would have prevailed. His advisers disagreed with his live-and-let-live policy toward the South, but they had disagreed with almost every decision he had made during the war. It was certainly a relief to many in the government when fate presented them with a dead martyr rather than a live, folk-hero President, whose people might not really understand his pragmatism but loved him all the same. Booth's bullet was more disastrous to Texas than Brutus' dagger had been for Rome.

Andrew Johnson, the poor-boy Tennesseean who became an accidental President in 1865, was a national disaster of another kind. Johnson, a Southerner and a Democrat—the usual compromise candidate for the Vice-Presidency—understood and completely sympathized with Lincoln's views. But Johnson, holding the powers his chief had made enormous, lacked support in the dominant Republican Party and thus any real political base. Nor was he a hero to the Northern masses; Lincoln's lost magic could not be transferred. Finally, Johnson was well-meaning but tactless, stubborn, and inept. In this first address to a Congress still smarting from its chivvying by Lincoln he said: "Your President is now the Tribune of the people, and thank God I am, and intend to assert the power which the people have placed in me."

Johnson not only was tactless and espoused an unpopular policy toward the late Confederacy, but he opposed the bulk of the domestic legislation of the Republican Party, on taxes, railroads, monetary policy, and states' rights. President and Congress were on a collision course.

Very little of this was seen by the native leaders in the paralyzed South, not even by Jack Hamilton, who worked to put things back together on Johnson's terms. The first step was to hold elections for a constitutional convention, which assembled on February 7, 1866. In this group were both old Unionists, such as John Hancock and Edward Degener, and one-time Secessionists, H. R. Runnels and Oran Roberts. The Blue faced the Gray. The majority of delegates, however, were conservatives of both factions. They chose as their leader General James Throckmorton, C.S.A. The old Whig, who had spent his political life fighting for what he believed best for Texas at the time, was now respected in both camps.

The convention quickly proposed several amendments to the state constitution of 1845, abolishing slavery, nullifying the secession ordinance, renouncing the future right of secession, and repudiating not only Confederate, but actually all state wartime debts. Civil laws unconnected with the war or Confederacy were approved. No real controversy arose in these fields.

A more troubling problem was the question of the new civil status of the former slaves. This was a problem the North, for all its commitment to freedom and pressure toward equality, never really understood or faced in the 19th century. Its own Negro population was minuscule. There was complete agreement in Texas that slavery was dead. But it was politically impossible for Texans to consider giving the freedmen full citizen rights. The remembrance of slavery was one factor, but the actual class status of the blacks was equally, or more, important. The horde of Negroes, through no fault of their own, were impoverished, illiterate, and unskilled. They were a bottom group, the lowest of the low, who had never participated in society or government. If Dr. W. E. B. DuBois later wrote that in 1861 not one white American in a hundred believed that Negroes could ever become an integral part of American democracy, the percentage in Texas was probably just as high in 1866.

The men sitting at Austin would have been dubious of giving rights to an equivalent horde of poor whites. However, there was another factor, which tended to be deprecated, denied, ignored, or obscured. This was the prevalent and entirely characteristic feeling of racial superiority common to all Northern European peoples. The educated and higher social classes in Texas took it for granted that the Negro was inherently inferior to the white; they could justify it by the Negro present and Negro past if forced to articulate. To whites lower in the social scale, it was not only a matter of truth but an article of faith.

In the retrospect of history it is not easy to offer simplistic criticism of Throckmorton, Pease, Hancock, Hamilton, and other capable men who struggled with the problem of Negro status. The Negroes were thoroughly differentiated both by color and by culture. It had taken the bloodiest conflict in modern times to make the Negroes free; it would have taken a social cataclysm of the most immense proportions to give the Negroes equality. In all times and in all places there were only three ways by which greatly differentiated peoples had lived together: as slave or serf and master; by miscegenation; or by some system of caste. The first and the last solutions, historically, were commonest; they had been employed from the New World to India. The Spanish, in America, had imposed a combination of the two, with considerable miscegenation on the side.

The new Texas constitution ignored the Thirteenth Amendment, which freed the slaves but also carried definite connotations of Negro equality. Freedmen were recognized as having status at law, with the right to hold private property. They had rights before a jury, with one exception: no Negro could testify in court in cases involving whites. They were specifically denied the right to vote.

John Reagan, who had been Postmaster General of the Confederacy and who had recently returned from detention in the North, repeatedly warned the convention that the state should make some token step toward Negro suffrage, such as giving the ballot to freedmen who could read and write. Reagan wrote that the North was in an ugly mood, and there was much sentiment for Negro equality; a little compromise could turn away much wrath. Texans treated this view with derision.