Carl Moneyhon is a leading expert on the Civil War and Reconstruction in Arkansas and Texas. His Texas After the Civil War gives a succinct overview of the westernmost Confederate state from 1865 until the late 1870s. While the driving focus of the book is political, elections and statecraft clearly count for much in Moneyhon’s retelling of Reconstruction, he also describes social, economic, racial readjustment after the war.
While Moneyhon is writing in the 21st Century, he acknowledges that many of his readers have a view of Texas Reconstruction that derives from Charles Ramsdell’s Dunningite description published in 1910. While that was not the last word on Reconstruction, Texas school books often reflected the implicit white supremacist assumptions of the Dunning School. Moneyhon writes that the:
story that follows is appreciably different from the traditional one. It views the coalition of African Americans and white Republicans that formed in Texas during this period as being every bit as representative of the interests of the people of the state as their Conservative opponents and possessing a legitimate claim to power. (Kindle 54-56).
Although Moneyhon provides insights into Texas post-war life that earlier authors had missed or distorted, this book is hardly a radical break with what has been published earlier. Instead, it is a workmanlike history of the state using traditional sources.
Texas had been the least impacted by the war of any of the states of the old Confederacy. While some ports had suffered at the hands of the Union navy and army, most of the state had not heard the tramp of Union soldiers. There had been no widespread destruction of infrastructure or decimation of the stocks of farm animals. Texas, because of its border with Mexico, was even able to carry on a limited international trade during the worst days of the Blockade.
Cotton had dominated the Texas economy before the Civil War and it would do so with a vengeance after it. While the popular image of the state is one of ranchers raising cattle, in fact, large-scale cotton production was more important. In fact, during the war the relative strength of the cotton plantations grew, because other farming and ranching tended to use white labor, which was increasingly drained to fight the war.
Moneyhon observes that “The fact that the war did not have a catastrophic effect on the state’s economy omy meant that the social world that grew out of it remained largely intact as well.” The white hierarchy was based on money, and the men who had money before the war were still the richest at the end of it. The one group who did see a change was the enslved population. Moneyhon writes that before Reconstruction; African Americans, constituting approximately a third of the state’s population lation in i86o, represented a caste apart, doomed by their status as slaves and by race to perpetual inferiority in the minds of most whites. The racial distinctions may have been drawn to justify slavery, but even after emancipation they remained crucially important to whites in distinguishing themselves from Blacks.
As in other parts of the South, the Federal agency charged with bringing some modicum of protection to Texas freedpeople would be the Freedmen’s Bureau. By January, 1866 the Bureau only had 21 Sub-Assistant Commissioners in the state, a very thin line of defense indeed. As in other states, the Bureau had the contradictory mandates of protecting Black rights and pressing freed slaves to work for whites, crafting a status less than the freedom white workers enjoyed.
Even with this limited mandate, the Bureau was met with opposition by planters. The Bureau requirements that labor contracts be in writing and understandable by the workers drew their ire, as did the Bureau opening the courts to lawsuits by Blacks against their employers.
From almost the very first weeks of Reconstruction in Texas, a climate of anti-Black violence took hold. A system of racial terror replaced slavery. Moneyhon writes:
Military officials received numerous reports of unoffending blacks shot down or beaten by men simply because of their race. Young white men were often the perpetrators of this brutality, and officials speculated that, at least in part, they acted out of their hatred against the victorious North. Unable to release their frustration safely against northerners or occupying soldiers, criminals directed their anger at the people who could not resist-freedmen and Unionist civilians. But economic nomic reasons may have underlay a large portion of the increased violence as individual landlords and whole communities tried to gain greater control over the freedmen and their labor.
Violence in the autumn of 1865 had a clearer meaning. As cotton began to be harvested in September, problems for the freedmen intensified. Blacks had faced the hostile outbursts of individual Texans since the war had ended, but the drastic changes in the state’s economic prospects that autumn encouraged greater levels of violence.
(Kindle Locations 492-500).
Planters faced declining cotton prices and responded by cheating their black workers out of their compensation. At the same time, planter interests and old Democrats worked to form a political opposition to African American advancement and Reconstruction under the name of Conservative Unionism.
The Conservatives were led by James Throckmorton, a pre-war Unionist who joined the Confederate army and served as an officer. When elections were held in January, 1866, former Confederates were allowed to vote while Blacks were barred. Many successful candidates, incredibly, ran on their records in the Confederate army. Those elected included even the president of the 1861 Secession Convention! More than a third of delegates had held commissions in the Confederate army and another fifth had served in the ranks. In selecting Throckmorton as president of the Convention the Conservatives showed their strength by winning the vote by two-to-one.
Unionists warned that unless Texas ratified the 13th Amendment, renounced secession, and offered at least limited suffrage rights to Blacks, Congress would never receive its Congressional delegation. Conservatives saw that the imposition of Black Codes that would essentially reimpose slavery on Blacks had backfired in other parts of the South, so while they rejected black civil rights, they were careful to move cautiously around the issue of race. The delegates rejected an effort to make the Constitution color-blind. They also barred state education funds from being used to educate Black children. The barred interracial marriage and prohibited Blacks from holding office. Moneyhon notes that there was little debate on these racial matters as former-Confederates simply assumed that whites would exclude Blacks from all that the state had to offer.
The Conservatives had been careful in their approach to race. What the members of the convention were less careful about was the issue of railroads. Railroad interests intensively lobbied the Democrats and Conservatives at the convention and won what would be considered today corrupt concessions to the railroads on debt repayment and land grants.
Seeing Throckmorton as a potentially winning candidate for governor, Secessionist Democrats approached the old Unionist to try to create a fusion ticket that would unite white pre-war Unionists and Secessionists around the necessity of maintaining white Texan control of the state government. Throckmorton agreed and the unified racial ticket adopted three principle according to Moneyhon:
opposition to African American political equality, opposition to the racial program of Congressional Reconstruction
(referring to the Civil Rights Act then before Congress); and support of President Johnson. The caucus dubbed their movement the Conservative Union party. (Kindle Locations 688-689)
The anti-Conservatives campaigned on a platform that claimed that the Conservative program would never be acceptable to Congress. They believed that it did not offer a way forward for the state, that it would further the exclusion of the Texas Congressional delegation, and that it invited prolonged Federal intervention in state affairs. They claimed that the Conservatives refused to acknowledge that the Confederate defeat had changed anything.
There was a high turnout for the 1866 gubernatorial election. The total number of votes actually exceeded that of the 1861 vote on secession. The Conservatives had convinced many white voters that their alliance was all that stood between white supremacy and the admission of Blacks to full civil rights. Throckmorton won the all-white vote by a margin of four-to-one.
Throckmorton carried every Democratic county, as well as some counties that had opposed secession in 1861. The opposition was only strong in counties with large numbers of German immigrants, many of who advocated rapid reintegration into the Union and an acceptance of the changed status of African Americans. Germans also disliked Throckmorton personally because he had been a Know Nothing prior to the war.
The vote on the new Constitution was much closer. Opposed by Unionists and Republicans, it naturally lost their twelve thousand or so votes, but the left was joined by many on the right as well. Moneyhon writes:
The tally for the constitution was only 28,119 votes to 23,400. At least part of the vote against the constitution came from Unionists, who by defeating it could prevent the new government from taking power. Yet the numbers indicate cate that many who supported Throckmorton also voted against the constitution or failed to vote on the issue at all. About the only explanation that voting patterns can give for this behavior is that many who remained secessionists sionists at heart preferred to remain outside the Union rather than in and that their votes were designed to defeat the constitution, if possible, but to elect Throckmorton in the event that it was adopted. Certainly, the election indicates the complex character of Throckmorton’s support in 1866. (Kindle Locations 742-744).
The new Conservative legislature refused to vote on the 13th Amendment ending slavery and voted to reject the 14th Amendment establishing Black citizenship (though not Black male suffrage). It passed Black Code laws that allowed courts to order African American youths to labor without pay for white planters until the age of 21. Whites were empowered to hunt down runaways and to punish these Black children with beatings. Unemployed Black adults could be captured by white authorities and sold at auction for terms of one year to their new white masters.
“Free” Black laborers could be fined by their employers for being impudent. Employers could dismiss them from their jobs right before their one-year term of employment was up and be relieved of paying them the money for the labor the Blacks had already performed. One Freedmen’s Bureau agent described the Texas employment laws as
“the most oppressive legal instrument yet invented to defraud fraud the laborer of his wages…. The wisdom of the men who made such a law would he lauded by a Mexican hidalgo for it is nothing less than a system of peonage.” (Kindle Locations 855-857).
The new legislature also passed laws that anticipated Jim Crow. One law, for example, required railroads to have separate accommodations for Blacks. While most race laws at this time were aimed at control of African American civil rights, political power, sexuality, and labor, Texas took the lead in formally segregating Blacks in areas beyond education.
Moneyhon says that the Conservatives were genuinely surprised when their racist laws were criticized in the North and in Congress. They believed that they had legislated with restraint. The Conservatives had carried out their program of racial supremacy while disregarding criticism from Texas Unionists, and they provoked a backlash.
The Conservatives also saw some cracking in their coalition as smaller farmers, drawn to the Conservatives by their racial animus and their resistance to central authority, objected to the debts being run up for the seeming benefit of the railroad interests.
The Texas legislature refused to spend money on education for Blacks, but it did find money for other projects. The did not accord many enforceable rights for African Americans, but they did call for the protection of the rights of the recent leaders of the Confederacy. Moneyhon illustrates the tone-deafness of the legislators:
its members showed how little their attitudes toward the Union had actually changed. Lawmakers took two actions tions that could not have done more to inflame northern opinion than a purposeful poseful insult. Members appropriated two thousand dollars for the state funeral neral and burial in the state cemetery of Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, setting up a confrontation between military and state authorities. They also passed a resolution calling for the release from prison of the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. (Kindle Location 883)
Governor Throckmorton acted as a defender of white landlords and opposed the rights of freedpeople. He actively obstructed the Freedmen’s Bureau and discouraged and Federal intervention on behalf of Black Texans. In this he was reflecting the deep racial antagonisms of his supporters. Moneyhon writes:
Through the winter of 1866-67, the efforts at depriving the freedmen of their payoffs continued. To make the point that little could protect blacks, whites often attacked those institutions connected to their new status. Schools for the freedmen attracted particular attention. The bureau’s efforts at creating schools had come at the same time that tension grew between whites and blacks over labor, and whites generally believed that the schools encouraged the freedmen to increased assertiveness. In a typical incident a mob greeted the first freedmen’s teacher to arrive at Marshall in January, 1867. During the melee, the mob broke out the windows of the teacher’s home and fired bullets lets into the house. (Kindle Locations 941-944).
When Blacks were the victims, Freedmen’s Bureau agents found that it was almost impossible for them to secure justice. Since the Johnson administration wanted the Bureau to use the local courts for redress, the whites-only judges and magistrates administered a whites-only brand of justice.
Many in the military and the Freedmen’s Bureau believed that the government had to act to protect Texas’s African American population.
White Unionists and African Americans met together in Union League assemblies to draft strategies for achieving greater respect for civil rights. General Griffin, commanding U.S. military forces in the state was angered that Throckmorton blocked the registration of Unionist voters. In March, 1867 the Third Reconstruction Act passed in Congress over Johnson’s veto and gave Griffin the power to remove Throckmorton, which he did in July. Elisha Pease was appointed governor. Pease moved to replace some Throckmorton loyalists.
Griffin died in September, but he was replaced by Gen. Joseph Reynolds, who continued Griffin’s policies. Andrew Johnson’s removal of Phil Sheridan as regional commander and his replacement of him with Winfield Scott Hancock led to a reversal for the Unionists. The Democrat Hancock did not want Reynolds involved in protecting civil rights.
In spite of violence against Blacks registering to vote, by November 1867, there were 57,368 registered white voters and 47,430 African Americans registered. It was clear that in a fair election, if even a sliver of the white vote sided with the African Americans then the Democrats might lose power . In February, 1868, Texas voters went to the polls to decide if they wanted a new constitutional convention to replace the white supremacist constitution.
36,932 Blacks voted for the constitutional convention with only 818 voting against it. About 2/3s of white registered voters failed to turn out. Many participated in a boycott of the vote. 10,626 whites voted against the convention and 7,750 voted in favor of it. Low white voter participation and the split in the white vote meant that the convention would be held.
Much of the book is devoted to what happened next. A coalition of African Americans and white Unionists gained majorities in Texas politics. The election of Grant as president strengthened their hand. Violence, a part of Texas politics since the Confederate surrender intensified as the Ku Klux Klan and its fellow fraternities of terror became as popular as Masons’ lodges. As the Republicans gained the upper hand they also divided with a conservative wing that at times seemed indistinguishable from the Democrats and moderate and radical factions as well. Some of the Republican divisiveness was based on policy, and more was based on the personalities involved.
The Democrats included Conservatives and Secessionists, and were also divided. The Conservatives and Secessionists agreed on the need to reestablish unchallenged white supremacy, but they differed on the means. Secessionists still had not acknowledged that the Confederate surrender changed the facts on the ground. They still hoped that somehow a path back to 1860 could be found. Conservatives recognized that much had changed, but they hoped to recover as much white power as possible. A third agrarian faction of white small farmers also worked within the party politically, although their economic demands often seemed at odds with those of the big businessmen and big planters who made up the party mainstream.
The Ku Klux sometimes functioned as a paramilitary for Democratic interests and sometimes responded to purely local concerns. Moneyhon writes that:
A salesman who lived in northern ern Texas and was a member of the Klan at this time outlined its purposes as being to “protect citizens of that country from military arrests and prosecution, and to defeat the radical party, and to prevent negro suffrage.” Its members bers understood that the groups’ objects were to be accomplished, “even at the cost of life.”‘ Given the stated goal of these local Klans, their greatest activity in 1869 ironically occurred in areas with relatively small black populations, the counties ties of northern Texas. In few of these counties did African Americans
compose pose more than one-third of the total population. This fact suggests that the Klan served a greater purpose for the Democratic party than its role in intimidating dating black voters- it provided a means for mobilizing and controlling white voters as well. Conservatives and Democrats had used racist appeals to attract political support even before the war; the Klan now gave that appeal an increased sense of urgency, suggesting the much feared war between the races had begun. (Kindle Location 1572)
In January 1869, the military announced that the new more liberal constitution had been ratified and that the candidate of the Radical Republican faction had won the governor’s election by a margin of 39,838 to 39,055. According to Moneyhon, the Radicals had won because of large-scale abstentionism by white voters once again. Edmund Davis was elected over the objections of a solid majority of white voters and non-voters. Moneyhon estimates that only 5,000 whites cast their ballots for Davis. In fact, Davis had only done well among whites in a few Republican enclaves and German immigrant communities. Davis would be derided for years as “the Black man’s governor.”
The new legislature did what the old Conservative one could not bring itself to do, it voted in favor of ending slavery-a dead issue for three years! The legislature ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
On April 28, 1870, the military was withdrawn from Texas.
Gov. Davis had three basic goals. First was ending the political violence in Texas. Second was promoting economic development. Third was establishing the legitimacy of his government in the minds of the state’s whites.
Not only had the party’s electoral victory been paper thin, the Texas electorate was changing from day to day. With one of the better Southern economies, Texas was attracting white emigrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama who had given up on their own states’ futures. So, when the long-time Black population of Texas finally got the vote, their power was diluted immediately by newcomers, many of them intent of the disenfranchisement of the freedpeople.
Although the Democrats made up a minority of the new legislature and they were divided on the issues, mot shared a common history of having been members of the Confederate army.
The legislature created a state police force of about 260 men. While Democrats would criticize the police as little better than criminals, Moneyhon says that their backgrounds were indistinguishable from those of the average Texas men. It included both Confederate veterans and former slaves. A State Guard militia was also established.
Gov. Davis appointed German immigrant Jacob DeGress as superintendent of education. DeGress insisted on establishing a modern school establishment that educated both blacks and whites in a state that had had almost no public education before the war. DeGress set up a ten-month school term with new textbooks for students. Democrats called for a four-month term instead, wondering why any child needed to spend three-quarters of the year in school. Dismantling the schools would be one of the first tasks of the Democrats when they came to power.
DeGress believed that the state needed a common curriculum and common textbooks. He argued that the state’s population was incredibly mobile and that students who might move to several different places during their childhood could only have educational consistency if schools across the state taught the same curriculum. Purchasing common textbooks also made sense financially. DeGress saved 30% on textbook purchases according to Moneyhon. DeGress also established statewide standards for teachers.
By the end of his first six months, DeGress had opened 1,324 public schools. More than six hundred more schools opened over the next six months. The schools became a focus of Democratic opposition, particularly the use of tax dollars to pay for the education of Black children.
In 1865 there were only 341 miles of railroad track in all of Texas. By 1873, there were 1,600 miles. Once isolated rural communities now had access to outside markets. The pre-railroad trip from Houston to Austin took two days. During Reconstruction the time dropped to 9 hours. Some sparsely settled counties saw 1,000% growth during this period due to the improvements in infrastructure. Sadly for the Republicans who supported this transportation revolution, many of the new settlers were old Confederates who opposed the Republican program.
The Reconstruction Era saw gains for Blacks in land tenure. In 1865 virtually no blacks owned land. In a study of three counties with large African American population, Moneyhon writes, between 15% and 24% were landowners by 1880. In Colorado County, Black landowners owned an average of 65 acres. Black children, who had once been prevented from getting an education, were schooled during Reconstruction, with 50,000 enrolled in the public education system in 1871. Black colleges for teacher training were also founded for the first time.
By 1872, the Democrats had adopted the strategy of The New Departure. Their campaign literature moved away from refighting the Civil War and towards acceptance of the Reconstruction amendments (which were law anyway).
The success of some Republican programs spelled their downfall. Whites had claimed that Blacks should not vote because they lacked an education. The fact that Blacks were receiving an education by 1870 meant that excuses for disenfranchisement based on illiteracy were fast fading away.
The Colorado Citizen of Colorado County attacked tacked the schools in May, 1871, as being used primarily to teach “negroes to be impudent to the white race.” A correspondent of the Dallas Herald complained that the schools not only encouraged racial amalgamation but also encouraged African Americans to idleness and self-importance. Such a course made them “intolerable to all decent people around them.” While the Democratic Statesman remained quiet on the issue, papers like the Neches Valley News in Jefferson County had a solution. Its editor declared his paper the “White Man’s Organ for the First Judicial District” and called for its voters to sustain “White Supremacy.” (Kindle Locations 2522-2524).
When the Democrats resumed a position of power in Austin they cut the school year from ten months to four. Democratic editors mocked the notion of professional teachers, saying that students would be better off with educators who had to support themselves through common labor. The Democrats also ended state tax support for local schools.
The assessment of Gov. Davis by Democrats was perhaps summed up by the the Clarksville Standard which said that the great sin of Davis was that “he endeavored to place us beneath the feet of the brutish negroes, who had been our slaves.”
(Kindle Locations 2807-2809)
The election for governor in Dec. 1873 was marked by lynchings and the forced disappearances of Black and Republican activists. The effects of intimidation could be seen in the vote. In Liberty County, for example, Grant had received 274 votes in 1872. In 1873 the Republican candidate Davis did not receive a single vote.
Reconstruction’s progress had ended and a long march towards Jim Crow had begun.
Moneyhon’s book offers a scholarly overview of a frequently misunderstood era of Texas history. While he does a good a job of telling the political story of Texas Reconstruction, the book has missing links. First is the absence of Black voices. African Americans are more acted upon than actors in Texas After the Civil War. It is difficult to make out how Black Texans evaluated Reconstructions victories and defeats from Moneyhon.
The book is also strangely lacking in discussion of the impact of Mexico and the French invasion thereof on Texas. Nor does the role of Phil Sheridan in Texas politics figure at all. Most other works on Texas after the war go into deeper discussions of these. If Moneyhon thought them peripheral to his story, he should have said so and explained why.
On the other hand, Moneyhon does a superior job of describing the economics of Reconstruction, both in the governmental sphere and the private. He also delineates the evolving factions withing the pro- and anti-Reconstruction coalitions.
I have read several books on Reconstruction in Texas and this is my favorite (so far) as an introduction and overview.
If you read it, let us know what you think.
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