Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  On the day Brown died, church bells tolled from New England to Chicago; Albany fired off one hundred guns in salute, and a governor of a large Northern state wrote in his diary that men were ready to march to Virginia.

  Further, a terrible suspicion of a widespread conspiracy in the North to foment a hideous slave insurrection in the South grew out of the investigation by Congress into the Brown affair.

  The revelation that Brown had been able to collect $23,000 in four months in Boston in 1858, for an admitted guerrilla war against slavery, and that many intellectuals refused to pronounce him guilty after it was proven that he had engaged in bloody executions in Kansas, because it was "decreed by God, ordained from Eternity," had a blood-chilling effect south of the Ohio. Above all, the identity of the "Secret Six" who had financed Brown's raid came as a horrifying shock. These were out of the cream of Northern society: minister of religion, capitalist, philosopher, surgeon, professor, and philanthropist, four of them with Harvard degrees. They had knowingly diverted arms and money raised to be used in "bleeding Kansas" to Brown in Maryland. As one admitted many years later, "It is still a little difficult to explain." It could be explained only in the sense that fanaticism was clouding American decency, confusing ends and means. This acceptance of civil violence by intellectuals still throws a somber light over American history.

  The conspiracy was neither widespread nor well-organized, although papers found on Brown seemed to prove so, and the puritan intellectuals who hated the South along with its peculiar institutions were a small minority. Although as some Southern historians like Woodward have pointed out, their view eventually became the dominant view, and the whole nation ceased to see the inherent blasphemy in the words of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," this probably could not have happened had not their sound and fury ignited a corresponding psychosis in Texas and other states. The notion that the entire North was determined to bring about bloody revolution not only paralyzed the planters, who were half convinced against their better judgment, but inflamed the average white. A Negro insurrection would not just affect the gentry; it would kill and burn out all white people in the counties.

  Again, because Southerners had been defensive too long over slavery and had cut most of their bridges of communication with the North, they lived in a sort of self-imposed intellectual exile. This, and the eroding effects of a continual physical and psychological insecurity, now fired hysteria. Ready to believe the worst, Texans reacted with characteristic violence.

  An inferiority and insecurity complex gripped almost the entire white frontier farming middle class. An old American practice, the "witch hunt," was revived. In such an atmosphere any irresponsible evidence was easily swallowed; everyone who had ever spoken against slavery, upheld Negroes or the North, was suspect. The countryside, from the evidence of letters to authorities and private correspondence, in the year 1860 was in panic. It was thought the South was honeycombed with traitors, and that every Negro was bloody-minded and ready to rise and kill.

  The panic took all its recognizable forms. A sixty-year-old preacher, a Democrat born in Kentucky who believed the Bible sanctioned slavery, criticized the flogging of Negroes in a sermon. His Texas congregation tied him to a post and almost killed the old man with seventy lashes on the back. In Palestine, Texas, a self-appointed committee collected all "dangerous books for destruction by public burning." People also burned possessions of Northern manufacture. Northern-born schoolteachers were hounded out; Yankee seamen were mobbed in the port towns. Guilt by association, if a man had Yankee friends, was accepted without question. Vigilance committees, the vigilantes, were formed everywhere. A secret organization known as the Knights of the Golden Circle sprang up across the state. The Knights' aims were to make the South safe for slavery and to conquer Mexico as a side order. Two filibusters were actually armed and organized, but before they reached Mexico, they were diverted to another, bigger war.

  During the summer of 1860, a series of mysterious fires blazed along the North Texas frontier. Barns and buildings went up in flames in Dallas, Denton, Waxahachie, and several other towns. Newspapers reported "abolitionists" were trying to burn out the South; horrible atrocity tales of slave risings, poisonings, and political murder—for which there was no basis in truth—pervaded the western counties of the heartland. At Dallas a large mob hanged three unfortunate Negroes, for no known cause. Three white men were lynched in Fort Worth, on the suspicion they had "tampered" with slaves. A spirit of paranoia and intolerance seems to have been everywhere, but noticeably, the wildest rumors and violence were confined to the white regions, west of the "black belt." In the old counties along the Colorado and Brazos the slaves continued to hoe and pick cotton peacefully, while the great planters agonized with Governor Sam Houston about the state of local and national politics.

  Similar violence and panic was occurring in some degree across the whole South; the wildest rumors seem to have begun in Texas, but they rapidly spread northward as far as the Potomac. In Virginia and Mississippi, many people believed Texas was in a state of chaos, induced by Northern conspiracies. One historian compared this mass delusion and mass fear with the "Great Fear" that seized France in 1789; in any event it precipitated political crisis.

  The great American tragedy was that in both Texas and in Northern states otherwise decent men had come to believe in diabolism and depravity on the other side. There were ugly aspects on each side. The repellent slavering by intellectuals over John Brown's body was matched by editorials in Texas advocating the restoration of the slave trade and violence against anyone who disagreed. Abolitionists ranted that the South must be "cleansed by fire" while Southerners grimly determined that the "higher law of self-preservation" was the only defense against the higher law defying their institutions and property rights preached by the Abolitionists. The failure of the North to condemn John Brown unequivocally produced a psychology of lynch law. While Garrison, in the North, asked the North how much outrage it would continue to take from the slavers, Albert Gallatin Brown, in the South, demanded "to what depth of infamy" his people were sinking if they took the provocations heaped on them. The Northern papers printed diatribes against slaveowners and "waved the bloody shirt." Texas editors told their readers if they permitted the North's conception of Negro equality, they were not men. Thus paranoia fed on paranoia, and in this poisonous atmosphere the ruling Democratic Party in the South convened at Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860.

  In Texas, the Calhoun Democrats had already gained complete control; now, they "abandoned restraint." In the state convention, the leadership resolved that Texas had the sovereign right to secede and resume its place as an independent nation. The party platform attacked the "unnatural" efforts of a "sectional party" in the North, the Republicans, to fight slavery. The men sent to the national convention at Charleston were radicals: Runnels, Lubbock, Bryan, Hubbard, and Ochiltree.

  Events at Charleston grew completely out of the crisis atmosphere. Douglas of Illinois, leader of the Northern wing of the Democratic Party, insisted, and had to insist upon his concept of "squatter sovereignty" in the western territories. The Northern Democrats, predominantly conservative, were willing to compromise with the South but not to follow the Constitutionalist lead. Although it was recognized the Republicans had gathered strength, and it would require a united national effort to retain the Presidency, the Texan and seven other delegations refused to accept Douglas as a candidate or to make any concession to Northern Democratic sentiment. They walked out of the convention. They knew they were destroying the national Party; they were sanguine about it because the vast majority of these men had already made up their minds to secede.

  The Northern Democrats reacted to the Southern threats of secession much as Sam Houston had predicted: they told the Texans and the others to go to Hell. The delegates from these states nominated Douglas and Herschel Johnson for their ticket. The eight Southern states that bolted the convention gathered in a rump session at Balt
imore and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a strong states' rights man, for President, and Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon for Vice President. The single unifying national party in the United States was now hopelessly sundered, but this was not enough; the conservative Southerners split off from the dominant radicals. The conservatives organized their own Constitutional Union party at Baltimore.

  This last group contained and represented most of the men of property, including the largest slaveowners, in the South. Secession frightened these men. They declared it would be ruinous to the South. They represented the calmest and best-educated elements in their states, with the least parochial view, and their platform was that the property-holders of the South must fight encroaching industrialism and abolition within the framework of the Constitution. If the South had been a genuine "aristocracy," they might have prevailed.

  Sam Houston of Texas received fifty-seven votes as the Constitutional Union standard bearer on the first ballot, but John Bell, of Tennessee, got sixty-eight. Bell carried the second ballot, and Edward Everett was selected for Vice President.

  A further split came when the Houstonians put their man up as a "People's candidate," but Houston, who toyed with running, soon withdrew and threw all his support to Bell.

  In this state of public hysteria in the countryside, which intensified, and this condition of political chaos, the nation approached the election of 1860. It was apparent to most people that the Republican Lincoln-Hamlin ticket might get an overwhelming electoral vote.

  As a Texas newspaper declared: "The great question that is agitating the public mind . . . is, 'What shall be done if Lincoln is elected?' The general sentiment in Texas . . . is against submission to the black Republican administration. . . . Such a submission . . . involves the loss of everything, and if consummated, will end in the prostration of the Southern states."

  This attitude can only be traced to mass hysteria, and a rising interest on the part of basically ignorant people in public affairs. The "black Republican" platform did insist that slavery was illegal in the territories, and that even Congress and the courts had no authority to enforce it there. But it did not, and could not, attack slavery in the established slave states without attacking the Constitution itself. Lincoln made clear his antipathy toward slavery, but also declared that he had no legal right, nor any intention, to try to destroy chattel slavery in the South. The planters were strongly for John Bell. They knew he could not win, but they hoped to salvage a Unionist sentiment. The great mass of voters, however, were overwhelmingly for Breckinridge in Texas.

  It was soon clear to political figures that neither Bell nor Breckinridge could win nationally, and the prospect set before the people was essentially this: a new Southern Confederacy, composed only of slave states, was preferable to continuance in a Union under Republican rule.

  Sam Houston was now sixty-seven years of age, and ill. But on September 22, 1860, at a mass Unionist rally he called at Austin, he got up from his sickbed to make what was probably his most eloquent speech, and also his worst-received. It was to be many years before Texans could read these words with anything like understanding of the true motives of this dying man.

  Houston spoke ringingly against disunion, come what may:

  I could point to the land of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson . . . where freedom would be eternal and the Union unbroken. I have seen it extend from the wilds of Tennessee, then a wilderness, across the Mississippi, achieve the annexation of Texas, scaling the Rocky Mountains. . . . I have seen this mighty progress, and it still remains free and independent. Power, wealth, expansion, victory, have followed in its path, and yet the aegis of the Union has been broad enough to encompass all. . . .

  What is there that is free that we have not got? Are our rights invaded and no government ready to protect us? No! Are our institutions wrested from us and

  others foreign to our taste forced upon us? No! Is the right of free speech, a free press, or free suffrage taken from us?. . . Has our property been taken from us and the government failed to interpose. . . ? No, none of these! Whence, then, this clamor about disunion . . . are we to sell reality for a phantom?

  There is no longer a holy ground upon which the footsteps of the demagogue may not fall. . . .

  I come not here to speak in behalf of a United South against Lincoln. I appeal to the nation. I ask not the defeat of sectionalism by sectionalism, but by nationality. These men who talk of a united South know well it begets a united North. Talk of frightening the North by threats? American blood, North or South, has not yet become so ignoble as to be chilled by threats. . . . The Union is worth more than Mr. Lincoln, and if the battle is to be fought for the Constitution, let us fight it in the Union and for the sake of the Union. . . .

  Who are the men . . . taking the lead in throwing the country into confusion? Are they the strong slaveholders of the country? No; examine the matter and it will be found that by far the large majority of them never owned a negro, and will never own one. I know some of them who are making the most fuss, who would not make good negroes if they were blacked. And these are the men who are carrying on practical abolitionism, by taking up the planters' negroes and hanging them. . . . Texas cannot afford to be ruined by such men. Even the fact that they belong to the Simon Pure Constitutional Democracy will not save them!

  Treaties with Great Britain! Alliance with foreign powers! Have these men forgotten history? Look at Spanish America! Look at the condition of every petty state, which by alliance with Great Britain, is still subject to continual aggression!

  We hear of secession—"peaceable secession." We are to believe that this people, whose progressive civilization has known no obstacles, but has driven back one race and is fast Americanizing another, who have conquered armies and navies, whose career has been onward and never receded, be the step right or wrong, is at last quietly and calmly to be denationalized . . . !

  The error has been that the South has met sectionalism by sectionalism.

  We want a Union basis, one broad enough to comprehend the good and true friends of the Union in the North. To hear Southern disunionists talk, you would think the majority of the Northern people were in the black Republican party, but it is not so. They are in a minority, and it but needs a patriotic movement like that supported by the conservatives of Texas, to unite the divided opposition to that party there and overthrow it. Why, in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey alone, the conservatives had a majority of over 250,000 at the last presidential election . . . because a minority in the North are inimical to us, shall we cut loose from the majority . . . ?

  If Mr. Lincoln administers the government in accordance with the constitution, our rights must be respected. If he does not, the constitution has provided a remedy. . . . I have been taught to believe that plotting the destruction of the government is treason; but these gentlemen call a man a traitor because he desires . . . to uphold the constitution.

  Who are the people who call me a traitor? Are they those who march under the national flag and are ready to defend it?. . . They are the 'Keepers of the constitution'. . . . They have studied it so profoundly that they claim to know it better than the men who made it . . . here is a constitutional party that intends to violate the constitution because a man is constitutionally elected president. If the people constitutionally elect a president, is the minority to resist him? Do they intend to carry that principle into their new Southern Confederacy? If they do, we can readily perceive how long it will last. They deem it patriotism now to overturn the government. Let them succeed, and in that class of patriots they will be able to outrival Mexico.

  Houston spoke as long as his strength lasted, clearly, pragmatically, destroying the arguments of the radicals one by one, pointing out their peculiar frame of mind, that of threatening secession every time something went against them. If it were not the election of Lincoln now, it would be because the slave trade were not restored, or slavers were hanged as pirates tomorrow. But he wa
s talking to a mass of people who were not interested in anything but their own fears, hatreds, and emotions.

  I can speak but little longer; but let my last words be remembered by you. . . . In the far distant future the generations that spring from our loins are to venture in the path of glory and honor. If untrammeled, who can tell the mighty progress they will make? If cast adrift—if the calamitous curse of disunion is inflicted upon them, who can picture their misfortunes and shame?

  This was Sam Houston's valedictory, a vision of a nation of honorable men, dedicated to certain basic laws, shunning all who would disrupt it, for any "convenient" reason, a mighty country bigger and more eternal than its passing frenzies or ideas, right or wrong.

  Houston tended to be an ethical, rather than a moral, man. This marred his image in some eyes. In the last months before calamity, Houston was actively exploring the chances of fomenting a war with Mexico. He moved Rangers toward the border, and tried to secure financing for the greatest filibuster of all. In this work, Houston's forty-seven years of advancing the cause of the United States westward must be taken into account. Houston never wanted a battle except when it served a greater purpose; his plans in 1860 were not a sign of senility but a desperate scheme to prevent the destruction of the American nation through secession. Houston briefly dreamed of a great, patriotic campaign to conquer all Mexico, which might make him President of the United States and allow him to save the Union short of civil war. Looking backward, a completely courageous Jacksonian in the White House might well have prevented the coming national tragedy. A man who could have again put down both Abolitionists and Secessionists with impartial severity might have retained an American balance. But Houston was too old, and the hour too late. As one writer described the Jacksonian years, There were giants in those days, and Houston was the last of them.