Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  The Army disliked the Ranger operations. The Rangers grew to hold the army in increasing contempt. The reasons were simple enough; the two forces, state and federal, operated under conflicting orders and sets of rules. The army tried to police the frontier primarily by keeping the peace. The Texans rode to punish the Indians and to push them back. The state again and again demanded that Texas be rid of hostile Indians, while Washington remained reluctant to act. All this created understandable tension.

  Two other trends that were strongly established at this time were the habit of securing federal monies through political action and the policy of the state government to seek windfalls to shore up its inadequate financial structure. Two such windfalls—provided no other state—came with annexation and were the result of President Jones's coy politics with the now eager President Polk. The Republic's finances had always been chaotic. Even Houston's strict financial discipline could not prevent continuing deficits, and these came on top of the revolution and Lamar's expensive wars. In Texas the only commodity of value was the endless land. This already had great symbolic, even mystic value, but very little of the Republic's lands could be translated into ready cash. In fact, because the problem of more people was primary, the Republic continued to give its lands away.

  On annexation, the Federal Congress appropriated $5,000,000 to defray some of the Republic's debts, which the United States assumed; and to satisfy the remainder, the state was permitted to retain title to all its public lands. Thus, there were no federal or national public lands whatsoever in Texas; the state owned all undistributed lands within its borders. But in the 1840s and 1850s, this land was of little use to settle the continuing debts. One reason was that the Comanches still held possession, even if they had no recognition under the law.

  The Republic's debt was of two kinds: revenue and nonrevenue. The nonrevenue debt was that owed to individuals, mostly Texans who had contributed goods or services during the revolution or Lamar's Indian wars. Most claims were small. The revenue debt was that owed to holders of Republic of Texas bonds, for which the customs receipts of the country had been pledged.

  After 1845, the Texas state government used its $5,000,000 to settle the nonrevenue claims, for obvious political reasons. The Federal Treasury, saddled with the revenue debt, protested strongly, but in vain, while millions in claims, many by foreigners, went unpaid. The state government, after exhausting the initial grant, continued bankrupt; the claims were pressing, while millions of dollars in new state services were still required.

  It must be understood that Texas had never had a true money economy during the colonial and Republican years, and there was no source of wealth except land within the state. Texans had vast respect for acres, but none for paper money. Further, they had fought a revolution to escape oppressive regulation. No local government was inclined to impose a direct tax of any kind; no planter was inclined willingly to accept one.

  This background gave both the central government and the state leverage to settle the New Mexico boundary dispute. As part of the last great national compromise over the slavery question, the series of acts called the Compromise of 1850, Texas was offered $10,000,000 for its claims to the Upper Rio Grande. In this national compromise, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun met in debate for the last time, and very nearly saved the Union, over Calhoun's obstruction. During the Congressional action, Sam Houston and the Texas delegation in Washington, working through the Maryland delegation, were able to secure the Boundary Act, by which Texas sold the United States its rights to Colorado and New Mexico.

  The act was strongly attacked in Texas by demagogues who argued that one provision—the retention of $5,000,000 in escrow to make sure the revenue debt was paid—impugned state honor, and that Texans should never surrender a foot of "sacred" soil. Against this cooler heads prevailed. Houston and many responsible conservatives ignored the question of "federal interference" and fought the issue out on the grounds that Texas had more desert lands already than it could use and that the old debts, sooner or later, had to be paid. The deal was actually a tremendous bargain for Texas; sentiment swung, and the Boundary Act was ratified by a special state election in which the planter vote was decisive. These men controlled the state government, and they needed money.

  But even this $10,000,000 was not enough; debts had piled up and interest had accrued. The revenue debt, which the Federal Treasury held ultimate responsibility for, was cannily left for Washington to deal with ultimately; however, again over protest, it was scaled down. There were two justifications for this: the old bonds had in many cases been bought up by speculators for as low as ten cents on the dollar, and in others the Government of Texas had never received full value for its bonds. They were scaled out to average a return of seventy-seven cents on the dollar.

  Meanwhile, the Texans pressed a mounting claim for state expenses for frontier defense. Each time the Rangers were called out, the bill was delivered to Washington, via Congress. Finally, in 1855, the Congress passed a new appropriation act: $7,750,000 more was given Texas, to settle both the old debts and frontier claims, once and for all. The details of this settlement are not important, nor is the fancy footwork that its passage entailed. What was important, then and for future history, was that the state emerged with almost $4,000,000 free and clear.

  This new windfall permitted the state to live officially "high on the hog." It began a vast building program of state structures. The federal monies allowed Austin, for six years, to remit nine-tenths of locally collected revenues back to the counties; one-tenth was constitutionally remanded to the state education fund. The money returned to the counties was splurged on new county courthouses and other local projects, few of which had been built before. These were, for local politicos, flush times in Texas.

  Two millions of the Federal windfall were put aside to endow the public school fund. Lamar had put an education act upon the books, but like most of the Republic's ambitious legislation, public education had not been implemented due to lack of funds. The actual credits were immediately loaned by the educational fund to railroad corporations, to finance construction. As with public buildings, Texans tended to prefer to spend for visible, practical signs of progress.

  The net result of the boundary bill bargain was that Texas during the 1850s was financed publicly almost entirely by federal money, and this had a more immediate effect than the setting of a theoretical boundary out in Indian country. Schools were endowed, public structures built, and the transportation system enhanced, all without a dollar being raised in domestic taxes. Manifest destiny, even above the costs of the Mexican War, proved expensive to Uncle Sam.

  But as Rupert Richardson observed, "The advantages of such a condition are obvious, but the system may have worked injury as well as benefit. The people learned to look to outside sources rather than to taxation as the means of supporting their government and were not prepared for the day when windfalls would cease."

  It is recorded that by 1860, the state government was once again almost $1,000,000 in debt.

  Chapter 17

  STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT

  During the decade and a half between the annexation of Texas and its union with the Confederacy, Texas experienced the most rapid growth in its history. Its population increased more than fourfold and its assessed property more than eightfold. That its cultural progress did not keep pace with its material development was the result of frontier conditions rather than the lack of fine innate qualities in its people.

  RUPERT N. RICHARDSON, TEXAS, The Lone Star State

  A great country for men and dogs, but hell on women and horses.

  OLD TEXAS PROVERB

  THE attitudes and institutions of Texas civilization were firmly established in the years between 1835 and 1861. This era was the great formative period of the heartland of the state.

  The pattern of American civilization in Texas was already widely divergent from the society then undergoing rapid change in the Nor
th and Northeast. Ninety percent of the immigration into Texas was composed of native-born people from the old South. About one-half came from the upper South, with its forested hills and frontier attitudes that lingered still; the rest came from the plantation economies and the black belts of the deep Gulf bend. Therefore, Texas was basically Southern in its cultural patterns; it was entirely agricultural, and it was a slave state. But it had one major difference from the Southern states: Texas still possessed a long and savage internal Indian frontier.

  In fact, by 1860, no other American state still faced a true frontier, where a line of fixed settlement was exposed to continual threats of violence.

  California and the Oregon Territory, which were becoming states at the same time, and the regions of the upper Midwest—Iowa, Wisconsin, and other states—experienced pioneer conditions, but in reality almost none of their populations were ever exposed to a real frontier. There were either no truly recalcitrant, warlike Indians in these regions, or else all Indians were removed before large-scale settlement began. In Oregon there was only one brief Indian uprising. In Texas, between 1836 and 1860, an average of about two hundred men, women, and children were killed or carried off each year. The reverberations of this warfare spread far beyond the actual limits of the Indian frontier, affecting both attitudes and organization.

  In other emerging states, the problems were those of clearing and settling virgin lands, forming local governments, and establishing law and order. Oregon had no difficulty in re-creating, on the Pacific coast, a prim and prosperous new New England. Oregon's inhabitants were earth-breakers. They were frontiersmen only briefly, during their passage west in covered wagons.

  The original Anglo enclave in Texas resembled the settlement of other states: Austin had chosen a region remote from dangerous Indians, and behind an Indian buffer. One quick, decisive campaign by his "ranging companies" convinced the sedentary eastern and central Texas tribes, such as Wacos and Tawakonis, that the Americans were better left alone. The Karankawas, already reduced to pitiful skulkers by the Spanish, European disease, and Jean Lafitte, were exterminated or scattered.

  The next step in a long tradition was that when the whites grew more numerous and needed more lands, the government was pressured to push the Indians out. This Lamar's administration did. Lamar cleared millions of acres of northeast Texas of Cherokees and allied Indians, and Lamar's wars in the southwest drove the Penateka Comanches higher up on the limestone scarp. After 1845, the Texans forced the U.S. government to move all the sedentary or semicivilized Indians out of Texas into Oklahoma. In this way one-half of the lands within the boundaries of the state were opened up for settlement; these included all the lands that were readily exploitable by the agriculture of the time. Settlement advanced into the vacuum across northeast Texas until it reached approximately the 98th parallel of longitude. Here, white civilization clashed abruptly with two factors it had not encountered before: the Great Plains, alive with mounted Indians, and a harsh climatic frontier.

  But the major expansion of Texas in the antebellum years was into and across the watered pine woods of the east, through the post-oak belts beyond, and finally, to the end of the rich, dark north-central prairie soils. At the same time, the old enclaves along the rivers expanded, filling up the interfluves. This was a huge area, and in spite of the massive influx of Southern people, it was still thinly held in 1860. While Oregon was recreating a distant farming colony, settled by New Englanders, Texas resembled most closely the old 18th-century Southern frontier.

  Life, culture, and agriculture had changed very little from the conditions of the previous century. Attitudes do not seem to have changed at all. Texas between 1836 and 1861 developed a new Cohee and Tuckahoe split, with cotton planters and Negroes in the eastern regions, a surly, sturdy horde of small corn farmers in the west. Thus, except for the fact that the state was newer and rawer, Texas was essentially no different from the South. Politically, and economically, it was part of the cotton kingdom—in fact, in these years, Texas was becoming the cotton kingdom itself. Until 1860, it was the fastest growing Southern state, and one of the fastest growing in the Union.

  The news of San Jacinto sent thousands of Americans heading west.

  Statehood, which promised even greater stability, increased the flow. In 1836, 5,000 immigrants crossed over one ferry on the Sabine. The panic of 1837, bad crop years, and the continuing depression in the United States pushed thousands more into Texas. The years 1840–41 saw the greatest immigration in Texas history. The Mexican invasions of the south in 1842 only briefly halted the flow; the news of the annexation treaty started more wagons rolling into the Southwest. Men painted polk & texas on their wagon tops, and passed through town after town, to cheers. All along the way, other families joined the trek. In some cases, whole communities in the older regions moved.

  Some of the migrants, restless, went on to California, especially after the word of gold arrived. Most carved out farms in Texas.

  The restless, continuing migration of the Anglo-Celtic upper South was now channeled across the Sabine. Iowa and Wisconsin had no Indians, but the climate repelled the Southern-born. The hardscrabble hills of western Arkansas were uninviting; the delta was already filled up. The new Indian border along Oklahoma was protected by the United States government, and it was considered permanent. The thousands of families who had worn-out, eroded lands, who had experienced bad luck, or who faced rising land prices in the States were pulled to Texas. Many left debts, but only a few, contrary to popular tradition, left crimes behind.

  The various governments in Texas, both Republican and state, used every possible means to lure more people in. This was not all caused by dreams of expansion of the race or a vision of Texas spreading from sea to sea. Texas was always a nearly moneyless region, living year to year on a credit economy based on the future values of land. Credit economies, and debtor regions, must expand in order to survive. The merchant, the land owner, and the state government not only profited from immigration—they had to have it merely to keep going. From the time of Stephen Austin, Texans equated growth with progress, and this became a fixation that never died.

  Texas's great bait was open lands. The Republic gave its land away freely; and the state, under the peculiar terms of annexation, owned all the public lands and continued the same policy. Legislation in Texas founded the right of every family to own land, with the exception, it must be recorded, of Indians and Negroes. The Constitution of 1836 guaranteed every family head already in the Republic access to a league and a labor of public land, more than 4,000 acres. Of course, these figures were more glittering than real: few families could work more than a few acres, unless they were rich in slaves. The land thus granted, if preempted, was rapidly sold off.

  The law provided any family man moving into Texas between March 1836, and October 1837, with 1,280 acres of free land. This acreage was later reduced to 640, but this was still more than any ordinary farmer could cultivate. For years, there was no requirement that a grantee had to live on, or improve, his acres. Later, a residence of three years in the state was required in order for final title to pass.

  The aim of the state was to create a country of freeholders, every white family owning land. This was considered the soundest possible democratic basis for the state. The system of Negro slavery was not thought inconsistent with this dream. Chattel slavery was restricted to Negroes, and Negroes, like Indians, were not classed as part of the American nation. Historically, such institutions were hardly unusual: Athens's famed democracy was restricted to some twenty thousand citizens, though the Athenian state encompassed many times that number of people.

  The land grant system was simple. A board of local commissioners in each county reviewed applications, and if valid, issued certificates for land to be taken out of the public domain. The grantee then engaged a locator or surveyor, who marked off a plot. Since the public domain in these years was enormous, the surveyor had no difficulty in finding lands wi
thin the average county. For his service the locator usually received one-third the grant. The survey field notes were certified and sent to the state land commissioner, who issued a patent. This system was a combination of Spanish-Mexican and American Southern practice. Its great benefit was that it passed title to individuals, yet cost the public nothing.

  Texas also enacted the first homestead legislation in America, in 1838.

  Among other things, this act provided that genuine homesteads could not be seized for debt—a radical, but lasting, innovation. Land was Texas's great, and only, resource; it was assuming sacred proportions at law. Against the rights of private property, in Texas, even the public rights of eminent domain often were in doubt.

  Another feature of this trend was the institution of preemptive, or squatter's, rights. Men who owned no land could claim public lands they happened to settle on, at fifty cents an acre, up to 320 acres. Land continued to be preempted until 1889, when there was no more public domain in the state. Even afterward, the codes provided for squatter's rights: if a man actually lived on a piece of ground long enough, he could not be moved off, even by the person who held legal title.

  These laws had nothing to do with land reform. They were passed to ensure the small holder's rights, in a time of confusion of surveys, when land speculation was rife and when most of the state was unexplored.

  Laws also granted large portions of public land to any and all the veterans of Texas wars, from the heirs of the Alamo dead to later American volunteers. Thus it was virtually impossible, theoretically, for a Texas family to be landless.