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Part I
The Great State of Texas?
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1 The Texas Way
I ask you today to join me in my fight for the ideals and values of the greatest people ever to inhabit this earth, the people of the great state of Texas.
(Greg Abbott, 2013)
In January 1822, Jared Ellison Groce rumbled into Stephen F. Austin’s new colony at the head of 50 covered wagons containing his family, household goods, and agricultural equipment. Behind the wagons some of his 90 slaves drove herds of horses, mules, oxen, cattle, sheep, and hogs. Groce immediately became and long remained the colony’s richest citizen. He received the largest land grant in the colony, eventually totaling 11 leagues or 44,000 acres of prime Brazos River bottom land. With ready money and an experienced labor force, he soon had the best of his land in cotton and his famed Bernardo Plantation rose on a bluff overlooking the river.1
Jared Groce, like most of the early Austin colonists, called the “the Old Three Hundred” in Texas history, came out of the American South. Groce was born into a prominent Virginia family in October 1782. Eager to make his own mark, Groce acquired a South Carolina plantation in 1802 at the age of 20. In 1804 he moved to Georgia and in 1814 to Alabama where he established a plantation called Fort Groce. Just a little more than six months after Stephen F. Austin arrived in Texas to take over his deceased father’s colonization venture, and one month after Austin himself arrived on the Brazos, Groce’s party arrived. Austin, the empresario or real-estate developer and leader of the colony, needed wealthy immigrants like Groce to bring people, agricultural expertise, and development capital to the colony. Groce generally cooperated with Austin, but always on his own terms. A fellow colonist described Groce as “a warm friend or bitter Enemy Just as his Immidiate Interest is Effected. . . . his Excentricities and Exalted notions of himself is his worst foibles.”2
Groce’s reputation for self-interested aristocratic eccentricity became legendary. In 1828 a proud Mexican official named Jose Maria Sanchez fumed to his diary that Groce had treated him with studied contempt. Sanchez wrote, “They did not deign to offer us shelter in the house, even though they saw us camping under the trees. Later, they asked us into the house for the sole purpose of showing us the wealth of Mr. Groce and to introduce us to three dogs called Ferdinand VII [then King of Spain], Napoleon [former Emperor of the French], and Bolivar [the hero of Latin American independence movements].” But Groce’s self-interested hauteur was not reserved for Mexican officials. William Fairfax Gray, a Virginia lawyer, military officer, and land agent, commonly referred to as Colonel Gray, was allowed to stay in the house while visiting Bernardo, but he also used his diary to criticize Groce. Gray attended the Convention of March 1 to 17, 1836, that declared independence and wrote the Texas Constitution, spent March 18 to 21 at Groce’s, and prepared to join the “Runaway Scrape” of Texas civilians fleeing east before Santa Anna’s advancing armies. As Gray and his party prepared to depart, some were concerned that they had imposed on Groce’s hospitality. Colonel Gray reports that, “This delicacy was cured when . . . he presented each with a bill for $3 per day, man and horse.”3
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Another of “the Old Three Hundred,” the sugar plantation owner Sterling McNeal, also arrived in Texas in 1822 and took up a land grant in what became Brazoria County. Like Groce, he prospered and his plantation became a common stop for travelers. In 1848–49, future U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio visited the region. He described McNeal as “A shrewd, intelligent, cynical, old bachelor. . . . Very fond of telling his own experience and talking of his own affairs.” Hayes went on to observe that “The haughty and imperious part of a man develops rapidly on one of these lonely sugar plantations, where the owner rarely meets with any except his slaves and menials.”4 While comparatively few men arrived as did Groce and McNeal with their fortunes in hand, many assumed that the lush new country would soon yield them a fortune. None other than frontiersman and former Kentucky congressman David Crockett, soon to die at the Alamo, wrote, “I do believe it is a fortune to any man to come here. There is a world of country to settle.”5 Hence, even those not yet wealthy practiced the haughty planter manner in confident anticipation.
A prickly defense of individual interests, a fulsome self-regard, and intolerance of outside authority, whether emanating from near or far, soon came to characterize the white male population of Texas. Several leading mid-twentieth-century scholars have described in very similar terms the mind-set or world view of early Anglo Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach, former head of the Texas Historical Commission and author of the iconic Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (1968), argued that, “the poorer whites and larger cotton growers . . . held very similar world views. Both were atomistic, . . . ferociously self-motivated and self-reliant, prideful and intolerant, hard-working and ambitious . . . both were impatient with government (which inevitably followed them) except as it served their wishes and interests.”6 D.W. Meinig, the prominent cultural geographer and author of Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (1969), made a similar point at greater length, saying:
W.W. Newcomb, the respected mid-twentieth-century anthropologist and Director of the Texas Memorial Museum, wrote that “Texans . . . came to regard themselves as a breed apart, perhaps, too, a chosen people in a chosen land.”8
In thinking about the three quotes above and many that will follow, the reader is always well advised to keep this question in mind—who are they talking about, who are the Texans that are being described? With a little thought, it will usually become clear that they are not talking about “all” Texans. In fact, they are not talking even about “most” Texans. They are talking about the “iconic” Texan: the “mythic” Texans of John Wayne’s Alamo, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and Edna Ferber’s Giant. Leigh Clemons, a scholar of contemporary media and culture and author of Branding Texas: Performing Culture in the Lone Star State, argued that a “white male, brazenly independent, and typically larger-than-life stereotype has defined the common perceptions of what it means to be a Texan, who does and does not have access to that identity, and what impact . . . that identity has on the state’s relationship with the rest of the country and among Texas residents.”9 Texan iconography does not have a place, certainly not an equal place, for blacks, Hispanics, Native-Americans, or women.
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Until well into the twentieth century, the reminder that the appellation “Texan” meant whites was unnecessary. Everyone knew that “Texan” referred to white people, though it was occasionally necessary to explain that to Yankees and Europeans. For example, N. Doran Maillard, an Englishman and editor of the Richmond, Virginia, Telescope, toured Texas from January through July 1840. In 1842, Maillard published The History of the Republic of Texas, explaining to his readers that, “The white population of Texas are called ‘Texans’ . . . The Texans are generally styled the first offsprings of America, and the grand-children of England.”10 Even in recent decades, scholars have felt the need to remind readers that history changes the meaning even of familiar words. Texas historian Billy D. Ledbetter opened his classic 1973 paper, “White Over Black in Texas: Racial Attitudes in the Antebellum Period,” by writing, “In this paper, the word ‘Texan’ refers only to white Texans—the accepted ante-bellum definition of the word.”11 Our initial inclination might be to think that the word “Texan” is no longer used so narrowly, but would we be right? Let’s leave that question open, but front of mind, for now.
In this opening chapter, we trace the origins, development, and political impact of “the Texas way.” No one will be surprised to find that the “empresarios” of early Texas and the leaders of the Texas Republic worked hard to attract wealthy white men, their families, property, and capital. From the perspective of white men, women were valued family members, but by no means equals, slaves were useful, even economically essential, while Hispanics, and even more evidently, Indians, were in the way. Yet, many will be surprised to find that the cultural assumptions of early Texas survived robustly into our own time. We trace the southern cultural heritage of early Texas and its evolution through Texas history—always supporting the primacy of male social and economic elites, personal autonomy and individual responsibility, small government and low taxes, and a deep suspicion of foreign, meaning federal as well as international, influence and authority.
The Southern Cultural Matrix of Early Texas
Cultural geographers have long understood that early settlers establish social, cultural, economic, and political matrices into which those who come later must fit. Pennsylvania State University’s famous cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky initially offered “The Doctrine of First Settlement” in 1973, the year he served as president of the American Association of Geographers. Zelinsky explained that:
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Texas was occupied before the Anglo-American influx, but it was very thinly occupied. As late as 1820, Mexican Texas numbered only three or four thousand non-Indian inhabitants, mostly in the San Antonio and Goliad areas, with a smaller mixed Anglo-American and Mexican population at Nacogdoches. But the opening of Texas to Anglo immigration, and especially the founding of the Austin colony in 1821, brought uncontrollable change. By 1835, t...
