Texas Divided

Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874

James Marten

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813183954
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Civil War hardly scratched the Confederate state of Texas. Thousands of Texans died on battlefields hundreds of miles to the east, of course, but the war did not destroy Texas's farms or plantations or her few miles of railroads. Although unchallenged from without, Confederate Texans faced challenges from within—from fellow Texans who opposed their cause. Dissension sprang from a multitude of seeds. It emerged from prewar political and ethnic differences; it surfaced after wartime hardships and potential danger wore down the resistance of less-than-enthusiastic rebels; it flourished, as some reaped huge profits from the bizarre war economy of Texas.

Texas Divided is neither the history of the Civil War in Texas, nor of secession or Reconstruction. Rather, it is the history of men dealing with the sometimes fragmented southern society in which they lived—some fighting to change it, others to preserve it—and an examination of the lines that divided Texas and Texans during the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century.

1

Southern Vigilantism and the Sectional Conflict

During the night of September 13,1860, a Fort Worth vigilance committee hanged a Methodist minister named Anthony Bewley for plotting to incite an insurrection among Texas slaves. Bewley was no meddling New England abolitionist, but a Tennessean who had spent his entire career working in the slave states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. His nativity failed to save him, however, and in a letter to his family from a jail cell in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a week before his death, he seemed resigned to his fate: “I expect when they get us we will go the trip.” He protested that none of the abolitionist sentiments with which he was charged “have ever been countenanced in our house,” and offered his wife the faint comfort “that your husband was innocent.” Nevertheless, Bewley realized that, as a member of the hated Northern Methodist Episcopal Church, he was fair game for any sort of vigilante activity, especially during “these times of heated excitement,” when “mole hills are raised mountain high.” It seemed “enough to know that we are ‘North Methodists,” and the Fort Worth vigilantes “had sworn vengeance against all such folks.”¹

That hunger for vengeance had risen from the ashes of a July 8 fire in Dallas that caused an estimated $400,000 worth of damage and destroyed most of the city’s business establishments. Fires struck several other North Texas towns on that hot summer Sunday; Texans blamed their slaves and marauding abolitionist “emissaries” for the wave of arson. Charles R. Pryor, the editor of the Dallas Herald, described the plot and the growing alarm in the northern counties of the state in a letter to the Austin State Gazette. “I write in haste,” he wrote, “we sleep upon our arms, and the whole country is most deeply excited.” The print shop of the Herald lay in ashes, and Pryor asked the Gazette to “warn the country of the dangers that threaten it. . . . All is confusion, excitement and distrust. . . . There never were such times before.”²

Throughout the rest of the summer, reports of burnings, poisonings, attempted murders, and other evidence of a widespread plot bred rumors all over the state. According to one source, the slaves had planned a general uprising on August 6, and “the whole country was in arms.” Newspapers castigated masters for “laxity and indifference” in the management of their slaves and blamed the uprising on “unwise indulgence and foolish charity” toward northern incendiaries. Public meetings passed resolutions condemning Black Republicans or other northern conspirators for corrupting otherwise faithful negroes. Texans in more than two dozen counties formed vigilance committees. Citizens of Rush Creek directed its committee to keep “a strict watch over the action of every stranger coming in our midst.” They vowed “to hang or burn” anyone trafficking in ideas, pamphlets, or poison among the slave population. Members of the Chatfield Vigilance Association pledged to defend their families, as well as their “honor and property,” against the “robbers, murderers, assassins, traitors, the incendiaries . . . and thieves” at large in the land; “believing that all the crimes condemned by God and man flow from [abolition] principles as naturally as bitter waters from bitter fountains,” they promised to “discard and ignore all smaller punishments” and to “inexorably execute our deliberate decree—DEATH!” The “people of Guadalupe” would assume to be enemies all northerners “whose antecedents are not known, and whose means of support are not visible.” The Matagorda Gazette, while boasting that “everything here is quiet and orderly,” declared that “the white man who is caught tampering with slaves in this community had better have his peace made with God . . . for if he don’t swing, it will be because there is no hemp in the South.”³

Hemp was apparently plentiful, for a Long Point physician wrote in mid-August that “a good many of these . . . negro lovers have already been hung up.” Vigilantes around the state hanged at least ten white men and nearly thirty blacks, although a contemporary estimate put the numbers even higher, at twenty-five and fifty, respectively. Most of the blacks were suspected of poisoning wells or some other kind of homicidal plotting; most of the white victims were northerners, although some of them had lived in Texas for years. Scores of slaves and several whites were whipped or banished from the state, or both, for their alleged transgressions. A young peddler found with several copies of Hinton Rowan Helper’s antislavery polemic The Impending Crisis of the South was allegedly burned alive in Buchanan. The woods near Bastrop seemed “to be alive with runaway slaves” apparently seeking to escape similar fates. Even innocent white men worried that their vigilant neighbors might suspect them of wrongdoing. Edward Burrowes, a young immigrant from New Jersey, asked his mother to “tell the folks sending me [northern] papers to stop, for I am afraid that it might get me in a tight place the way things is going now. Thair was two men hung in some of the upper counties for takin northern papers, and I might get in the same fix if they keep on coming.”⁴

The violence climaxed in September with the hanging in Fort Worth of the fifty-six-year-old Bewley. At the time of his death he was a missionary in the Arkansas Mission Conference of the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church. Texans had long associated Northern Methodist ministers with abolitionism, and a mob had broken up their 1859 annual meeting in Bonham. The events of the next year raised even more suspicions. “As is the custom in the worlds [sic] history of such matters,” Gideon Lincecum sarcastically wrote to his nephew, “the insurrection was conducted in the name of the Lord. Poor Lord, he stands a bad chance to sustain a good character, for the damndest rascals perform their villainies in his name universally.” Assigned to Texas less than two months before the insurrection panic erupted, Bewley arrived at a time when Texans were desperately casting about for “dangerous” characters. Despite his apparent moderation in regard to slavery, Bewley fled Fort Worth in mid-July. Bewley’s vocation, the timing of his appearance in Texas, and a letter that he supposedly lost under a haystack outlining plans for an abolitionist conspiracy “convicted” him in his absence. The local vigilance committee’s offer of a $1000 reward inspired a posse of Texans to track Bewley all the way to Missouri, drag him back to Texas, and hang him without a trial.⁵

Bewley’s ordeal reveals the most drastic way that southerners punished those they perceived to be disloyal. Indeed, the decades after 1820 produced many crises similar to the Texas “insurrection” of 1860, during which southerners could perfect means of enforcing standards of loyalty. Vigilance associations and mass-produced justice were not invented by Texans, however; they were an American tradition during the antebellum period, and appeared whenever dissent reared its disloyal head in the south. The members of the mob who lynched Bewley simply played out the southern ritual of eliminating ideas that posed a threat to a way of life that by 1860 seemed to face enemies from all sides, particularly from the North. Lynching was, of course, the most extreme method of extending discipline to faithless southerners; it was complemented by equally effective political, rhetorical, and social versions of censorship and punishment. Such methods of ensuring sectional loyalty demonstrated a growing southern defensiveness in the face of the rising power of the North, along with a commitment to protecting slavery and providing for its expansion. These ideas created a sense of loyalty to the South that encouraged southerners to lash out at any external or internal enemy that challenged southern values or interests. Of course, northerners also employed mob violence to enforce community standards and to express political opinions. Ironically, the same ideas about slavery that angered southerners often led northern rioters to attack abolitionists.⁶

Southerners usually underestimated northern antiabolitionism, however, and their intolerance of challenges to southern society from within often coincided with periods of sectional friction. W.J. Cash, in his classic analysis of the southern mind, asserted that conflict with “the Yankee” inspired “the concept of the South as something more than a matter of geography, as an object of patriotism, in the minds of Southerners.” The old loyalties to states and communities, Cash wrote, “would be rapidly balanced by rising loyalty to the new-conceived and greater entity—a loyalty that obviously had superior sanction in interest, and all the fierce vitality bred by resistance to open attack.” As a result, every revival of the northern threat to southern institutions caused defensive southerners not only to oppose northern aggression, but also to punish those who failed to meet their responsibilities as loyal southerners. A southern man’s most pressing obligation of course, was to defend slavery, and most cases of perceived disloyalty involved some sort of violation of this element of the southern code. Economic interest and the need for social stability combined to make “slavery . . . no abstraction—but a great and vital fact,” wrote Arthur P. Hayne of South Carolina. “Without it our every comfort would be taken from us. Our wives, our children, made unhappy—education, the light of knowledge—all all lost and our people ruined forever.” That religion became one of the rocks on which slavery stood encouraged southerners to enforce sanctions against anyone who in some way threatened slavery.⁷

The deepening rupture between the sections redefined southern loyalty so that it encompassed more than just a proper reverence for slavery. As southern extremism grew, southern Whigs, National Democrats, and Unionists, among others, risked the same sort of public censure as the few antislavery men who lived in or passed through the South. By the beginning of the Civil War, southern radicals commonly applied the epithet abolitionist to political enemies who resisted secession or any other expression of southern rights. The same methods for punishing racial disloyalty proved popular in punishing political disloyalty, and vigilant southerners organized associations to enforce loyalty during sectional crises, important elections, and after the secession process had begun.

John Brown’s futile expedition to Harpers Ferry in 1859 deepened the South’s commitment to vigilance and raised the stakes in its drive to eliminate dissent. The raid set off a wave of panic and led southerners to practice the stern vigilante measures they had used against aliens or disloyal natives for years. Residents in every parish and district in South Carolina held public meetings and organized vigilance committees charged with protecting the public from rabid abolitionists. Vigilantes in Columbia, South Carolina, captured, whipped, and tarred and feathered an Irish stonecutter for allegedly using “seditious language” against slavery. In North Carolina, “a wave of panic approaching hysteria” caused concerned authorities to censor the mail, step up slave patrols, and eye suspiciously free blacks and northern teachers, peddlers, and Methodist ministers. Mississippians withdrew their sons from northern colleges, kicked out Yankee teachers, and imposed an “intellectual isolation” upon themselves that shut down all communication between this crucial southern state and the North. The fear spawned by Brown’s raid swept many previously cautious southerners into the radicals’ camp and provided the southern nationalist movement with a much needed momentum.⁸

A year later the North and the South reaped the harvest of four decades of sectional strife, as Lincoln’s election set in motion the chain of events that culminated in secession. The southern campaigns of the Constitutional Unionists, the Southern or Breckinridge Democrats, and the National or Douglas Democrats, revealed how few political and philosophical options were open to politicians and individuals in the slave states by 1860. Every party promised to guarantee southern rights and to resist the incursions of meddling Yankee abolitionists. In many cases, according to one historian, the campaign degenerated to “a shouting match to see who could call the Republicans blackest.” Differences between Garrisonian radicals and moderate Republicans were ignored; anyone who failed to defend southern rights must oppose them. The realities of politics in the South forced politicians of many stripes into a narrow range of options, and no one who hoped to win—outside the sparsely populated and frequently Unionist mountain regions—could espouse any creed that challenged southern orthodoxy. Voters were similarly restricted, and vigilance committees mobilized in many areas to ensure the appropriate balloting. The Nashville Union and American, like many southern papers, called on its readers and the entire South to unite behind the Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, for only he had a chance to prevent the election of Abraham Lincoln. “Can any true Southern man calmly contemplate such a result without horror and the deepest humiliation?” asked the Union and American. “If he does not feel humiliated for himself he must feel so for his children’s sake. If this be so, has the South lost her manhood? Is she so weak, imbecile and distracted that her sons cannot unite and strike one good, strong, healthy blow for her independence and equality[?] . . . Every true Southern patriot will say, ‘strike the blow.’ ”⁹

Southerners who refused to strike the particular blow advocated by the Nashville paper were excoriated, as many southern dissenters had been before. One of the men that nationalistic southerners loved to hate during the campaign was Georgia’s Herschel V. Johnson, a Unionist who was also Stephen A. Douglas’s running mate. Throughout the South, particularly in Georgia, crowds hissed Johnson, hanged him in effigy (once just outside his hotel room in Macon), and threatened him with violence. When his train stopped in Georgia towns on the way home from the national nominating convention, Johnson recalled, people “would gather at the windows to get a glance at the man who dared to stand boldly in opposition to the sectional disunion movement of the Breckinridge democracy.” Johnson knew that Georgians did not crowd depot platforms to catch a glimpse of a favorite son: “They eyed [me] not as a hero they wished to admire, but as some curious specimen of the genus homo, who deserved the gallows, for alleged treason to the rights of the South.”¹⁰

Loyalty to the South was not an issue that suddenly appeared in 1861. Obviously, not every southerner worried about his neighbor’s politics or his allegiance to slavery. But the rising concern of a growing minority of antebellum southerners reveals much about the ways that southerners perceived their interests, defined loyalty, and purged from their society people or opinions that they believed threatened slavery, southern political institutions, or the conservative social system. The months following the Harpers Ferry incident saw the frantic creation of one of the few regionwide campaigns to drive dissenters out of the South. More often, local vigilantes, spurred to action by slave insurrections, sectionalized political campaigns, or other emergencies, flushed from the system individuals who became scapegoats for southern disappointments and fears.

Mere chance cannot explain why some dissenters suffered the slings and arrows of vigilantism while others remained to a greater or lesser degree unmolested. Economic status, social position, and geography all played a part. Hapless Methodist missionaries, for instance, were more vulnerable to expulsion or violence than prominent politicians, attorneys, or planters, who usually had to contend only with angry epithets and editorials. Vigilant southerners used a wide variety of techniques to suppress heresy, or to convince their friends and colleagues of the error of their ways. In addition, although the persecution of individual dissenters never failed to receive a lot of attention and usually a fair amount of public acclaim, the southern gospel of individual liberty usually kept the newer doctrine of southern loyalty from overcoming justice, common sense, and the normal functioning of partisan politics.

The act of secession and the formation of the Confederacy at least temporarily changed all that, as it institutionalized antebellum vigilance and suddenly labeled men who had considered themselves good southerners as traitors to the South. Decades of a rather erratic enforcement of southern values suddenly became Confederate policy. Many men who, even after the events of 1860 and 1861, still could not tolerate southern radicalism, faced an abrupt transition in public sentiment, as for a short time the South united in its contempt for the North and for anyone who did not support the Confederate cause. Benjamin Hedrick had experienced this phenomenon five years earlier, when he lost his professorship at the University of North Carolina for supporting John C. Fremont for president. In a letter to university official Charles Manly, he wrote that, as a native of North Carolina, he had “always endeavored to be a faithful law abiding member of the community. But all at once I am assailed as an outlaw, a traitor, as a person fit to be driven from the State by mob violence, one whom every good citizen was bound to cast out by fair means or foul. This was more than I could bear.” Thousands of southern men accused of treason, disloyalty, or disaffection during the war could have written those words. Few Unionists or antislavery southerners considered themselves outsiders; most no doubt believed that their ideas held out the best hope of progress and security for the South’s future. Yet that vision of the future did not mesh with the ideas of the other good southerners who controlled the southern states after late 1860.¹¹

When Texas joined the Union in 1845, she inherited a history of sectional tension that helped determine her course over the next sixteen years. In a state dominated by immigrants from the Southern states and with an economy increasingly dependent on slave labor, the political and economic interests of most Texans placed them solidly within southern traditions. As a result, the vigilante heritage of the South found an application in Texas, and the development of the idea of southern loyalty spread to Texas after the Mexican War. This vigilance, combined with the violence endemic to frontier Texas, created a place where, according to one Galveston resident, “a man is a little nearer death . . . than in any other country.”¹²

Texans generally kept pace with their southern compatriots in ferreting out and disciplining individuals or groups who violated their perception of loyalty to the South. As in the other slave states, most instances of pre...