Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  Missing from the list of doctors so exempted was Thomas J. Taliaferro, a slave owner and physician who had brought at least a portion of his workforce to Texas in late 1862 or 1863. Taliaferro had joined the 46th Tennessee Infantry in Henry County, Tennessee, in November 1861, when he was thirty-six years old, enlisting as an assistant surgeon. Later he was captured by Union soldiers and imprisoned in Camp Douglas, Illinois. Discharged in Chicago in July 1862, he was exchanged in return for Union prisoners two months later in Vicksburg, Mississippi. His regiment moved to Jackson, where it was reorganized. However, Taliaferro resigned from service and apparently returned home, either to Virginia or Tennessee, to gather his slaves, soon afterward striking out for Texas. In early 1863, he bought about two hundred acres in the north-central part of McLennan County. Taliaferro was not listed with other Waco physicians on the exempted list, however, perhaps because he had already fulfilled his military obligations or because the terms of his parole forbade him from rejoining the army.18

  Among the workers Taliaferro brought to Texas in 1863 were at least four slaves who had been born in Virginia—Charlotte, age twenty-nine; her twelve-year-old daughter, Lucia; her seven-year-old son, Tanner; and another young woman, Jane, eighteen. Since Charlotte was dark-skinned—and, according to at least one Waco white man, “comely”—it is probable that the fairer-skinned Lucia was the daughter of her master (that was the rumor around town) or another white man. Charlotte and Jane both bore children at an early age. Soon after coming to Texas, Charlotte had another son, Webster, and Jane gave birth to her first child, Nellie.19

  For Lucia, the trauma of a forced march to Texas was perhaps mitigated by the presence of her mother, younger brother, and Jane. It is possible that Dr. Taliaferro worked full-time as a physician, and so spared his slaves the arduous labor of clearing the land. Charlotte had housekeeping skills, and as a young woman, Lucia, too, learned to cook and sew, so she probably never had to work in the fields. Still, she was old enough to remember leaving familiar surroundings in Virginia and enduring long weeks and months on the road, an ordeal that must have haunted her the rest of her life.

  WHEN THE WAR ENDED IN THE LATE SPRING OF 1865, THE LAWLESS town of Waco proved an unlikely refuge for freedpeople from the nearby countryside, where white Texans tried to re-create slavery in all but name. In 1866, Taliaferro returned to Tennessee to marry Martha D. Woods. It was perhaps in his absence that Charlotte and Jane resettled their children in Waco, away from the horrific abuse meted out to freedpeople in rural McLennan County. The former slave Oliver Gathings also abandoned the plantation of his owner and moved to Waco. By this time, James J. Gathings had organized a criminal gang that prowled the countryside, shooting and whipping black men, women, and children. An official of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—a federal agency authorized by Congress in March 1865 to ease the transition from slavery to freedom—alerted his superiors to the crimes perpetrated by the Gathings gang. Another local bureau agent cited the pervasive castrations, burnt limbs, gouged eyes, and other instances of mutilation and murder to suggest that black people might be better off re-enslaved.20

  The many instances of white-on-black violence were part of a general reign of terror on the countryside. Vigilante “drum-head courts” pronounced guilt upon and then hanged accused offenders because, in the words of one bureau officer, the people “seem[ed] to have lost all confidence in jails and regular trials by jury.” Armed with six-shooters, individuals declared themselves the law—sheriff, judge, jury, executioner—and labeled every victim a horse thief as a pretext for whippings and murders. Despite whites’ intense demand for their labor, blacks tried to resist signing labor contracts, preferring to work for themselves; but lacking land and credit, they had little choice but to resume planting and picking cotton and hoeing the fields for white landowners, their former masters, only to be cheated out of their wages at the end of the year.21

  Exhibiting what one Union officer called a “lofty spirit of disdain” toward all Yankees, the white people of Texas defied a federal mandate to reorganize the state government. By December 1865, all of the other former Confederate states with provisional governments had held constitutional conventions and elected new officials. Texas alone failed to elect representatives to Congress that month. The 11th Texas Legislature, which met in August 1866, refused to ratify either the Thirteenth or the Fourteenth Amendments, which together abolished slavery and granted citizenship rights to the former slaves. Although federal troops occupied parts of Central Texas, neither they nor Freedmen’s Bureau agents could keep track of all the attacks on blacks by whites, all the “outrages.” Whites acted as individuals as well as in groups, which included not only the Ku Klux Klan across the South but also homegrown terrorists such as the Gathings gang, the Families of the South, the Knights of the Rising Sun, and the Fishbackers (led by Bud and Bill Fisher). These whites had a term for raping black women and girls—“splitting” them.22

  Charlotte no doubt feared for her safety and the safety of her children. Moreover, a new set of “Black Codes” posed a direct threat. An 1865 involuntary apprenticeship law authorized local officials to seize black children and put them to work for white men and women. The following year, the legislature passed “An Act to Define and Declare the Rights of Persons Lately Known as Slaves, and Free Persons of Color.” This law required that all family members toil in the fields, prevented black workers from recovering wages fraudulently withheld from them, and provided for harsh punishments for “vagrants”—that is, blacks not working under direct white supervision.23

  In moving to Waco, Charlotte sought to protect her family from the white predators on the countryside, from the Black Codes—and possibly from Taliaferro himself. The town offered paid (if ill-paid) employment, a community of formerly enslaved people who were building their own churches and schools, and shelter from vengeful planters and marauding gangs. The family’s removal to Waco was thus part of a larger, region-wide migration after the war, when even small towns beckoned to freedpeople eager to escape the constraints of slavery that still prevailed throughout much of the rural South.

  POSTWAR WACO ATTRACTED WHITES AS WELL AS BLACKS. IN 1865, after four long years of a soldier’s life, twenty-year-old Albert Parsons joined a steady stream of war veterans returning home. He immediately “traded a good mule, all the property I possessed, for forty acres of corn in the field standing ready to harvest, to a refugee who desired to flee the country.” He hired a group of freedpeople, and “together we reaped the harvest.” With the proceeds, he paid for a semester’s worth of tuition at the local Waco University (which later merged with Baylor University and took its name). Enrolled in the preparatory division, he studied spelling, reading, arithmetic, and penmanship. After one semester he left school and took a job as a typesetter, and soon after that another job in the county clerk’s office as a deputy clerk. Like other young Waco men-on-the-make, he became a member of the local Freemasons Lodge 92 at the level of “Apprentice Degree.” At this point he was probably boarding with his sister and her husband. Albert’s acquaintances would variously refer to him as “Colonel Parsons” or “Captain Parsons,” honorific terms based on his military service in the war. By early 1867, possessed of the basics of a formal education and a firm, bold style of handwriting, he was well positioned to become a bookkeeper or the manager of a dry goods store and an upstanding member of the Waco business community.24

  Yet Albert Parsons had far greater ambitions and, as it turned out, a taste for risk, and so he became swept up in postwar politicking. For the outnumbered Unionists in Waco—a few whites and all of the blacks—the immediate postwar years had brought fresh humiliations, as former Confederates continued to lord it over the town, county, and state. One Waco Unionist wrote to the Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens explaining the vulnerability of all who had opposed the Confederacy: “To the same old persecuting hell hounds of treason, we must now look for that protection to life
and property we have been bereft of for six years. Will we get it? Will the kite protect the sparrow, will the lion protect the lamb?” Still, in the spring of 1867, the passage of Congressional, or Radical, Reconstruction mandated the federal military occupation of the defeated South, which meant that in Texas the path to political power would run through the newly organized state Republican Party. Later, Parsons would profess support for “the reconstruction measures securing the political rights of the colored people,” citing as the impetus for this new commitment the “love and respect for the memory of dear old ‘Aunt Easter,’ then dead, and formerly a slave and house-servant of my brother’s family, she having been my constant associate and practically raised me, with great kindness and a mother’s love.” Yet it is not clear that his Republicanism was a principled stance in favor of black rights or an opportunistic move, as it opened up possibilities for him to take patronage jobs and gain a wider influence within the state. He wrote, simply, “I became a Republican, and, of course, had to go into politics.” In organizing the fledgling state Republican Party, he joined a few southern-born whites, the vast majority of freedmen, some northern newcomers to Texas, and the state’s German population (who made up 5 percent of the total population).25

  Parsons’s regular encounters with German Americans in Texas Republican politics would turn out to be a significant development in his life. Though Texas Germans were not numerous overall, in certain parts of the state—the coastal plain to the east of Waco and the Hill Country to the west, in particular—they played an outsized role in wartime politics. Diverse in terms of their religious affiliation, economic pursuits, and culture, they were bound by a common language, and a goodly number of them had opposed slavery and secession. During the war many had suffered mightily at the hands of their Anglo neighbors, who resented and feared the foreign-born, liberal, free-thinking Unionists. In the Hill Country, most wartime deaths resulted from raids by pro-slavery men on farms owned by German immigrants, some of whom were hanged or shot; it was no wonder that the postwar Republican Party included such a large German American presence. Parsons regularly saw these men at local and state conventions and at rallies, and he probably picked up at least a rudimentary understanding of their native language. Eventually the German connection would determine where Albert and Lucy lived, the parameters of their social life, and even the ideas and political culture they embraced as radicals.26

  IN 1868, AFTER HER ARRIVAL IN WACO, CHARLOTTE MARRIED Charlie Carter, a Virginia-born freedman who worked at J. B. Baker’s brickyard on the east side of the Brazos. (On the marriage certificate her name is listed as “Charlott Taliferro.”) Charlie had dropped his slave name, Crane, to take the name Carter, which Charlotte also assumed and in turn gave to her three children. To help support the family, Lucia found odd jobs as a cook and seamstress in the homes of several northern transplants, and her mother also labored as a domestic servant. Yet at an early age the younger woman sought to take control of her own life to create a future bound neither by her former master nor by her mother.27

  When she was sixteen or seventeen, Lucia became attached to the man formerly called Oliver Gathings, who was thirty-five or thirty-six. He would always maintain that they had married, although there is no evidence that they did so—legally, at least. After the war, the Mississippi-born freedman endured the ridicule of Waco whites by aggressively adopting a new persona—he took the surname of his father, Benton, in place of that of his former owner. On June 19 of every year he put on his best clothes and celebrated Juneteenth to mark the emancipation of Texas slaves on June 19, 1865. Throughout his long life in Waco, Benton would find a steady stream of handyman’s work, making a decent enough living, given the limited opportunities for a black man. He encouraged Lucia to attend the first school for black children in Waco and paid her expensive monthly tuition fees—spending “all his cash balance upon her education,” he told one reporter. Perhaps he was also able to indulge her with the fine clothes she loved.28

  Charlie Carter and Oliver Benton parlayed a postwar Waco building boom into jobs that paid cash, following livelihoods that eluded many black men in the countryside. Although most freedmen in town were limited to menial work, a labor scarcity allowed some to find employment as draymen, waiters, cooks, barbers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and butchers; these men could earn enough to establish households apart from whites and allow their wives to stay home and their children to attend school. The relative financial stability enjoyed by some black Wacoites spawned a class of leaders from the ranks of preachers, teachers, and skilled tradesman, several of whom became active in the Republican Party. The blacksmith Shep Mullins helped to oversee the purchase of a fourteen-acre tract of land for $75 for a schoolhouse, a key institution for any freed community. One sympathetic observer noted, “The colored are well united and very anxious for acquiring knowledge.”29

  The sight of a black school, no matter how ramshackle, inflamed the local white population. At the same time, literate black and white men and women competed against each other for jobs as teachers, struggling to earn a modest living in the cash-starved postbellum South. One recently arrived New Hampshire native, David F. Davis, started his own Waco school in April 1866, and Lucia Carter became one of his pupils soon thereafter. As schoolmaster, Davis faced challenges both financial and political. He jealously guarded his modest monthly commission from the Freedmen’s Bureau. (Asked how long federal support would be needed to support such schools, one Waco bureau agent answered, “Until the present generation of [white] Southerners die.”) Davis argued against the use of white women and freedmen as teachers, claiming that both groups were incompetent in the classroom. He faced the wrath of local black teachers, who considered him a meddlesome interloper, and of black and white missionaries, who disapproved of his nonsectarian brand of schooling. Contentious school politics could mirror Republican politics, with presumed allies competing and feuding with each other. And in fact, although David Davis and Albert Parsons soon took their place among Waco’s leading Republicans, they were rivals—for local influence, for the favor of the governor, and perhaps even for the affections of Davis’s precocious pupil Lucia Carter.30

  While freedpeople worked to secure the rights of full and inclusive citizenship and to achieve control over their own productive energies in the town and in the fields, some young black and white women and men flaunted the social conventions that had been integral to the slave system. By 1867 or so, Albert Parsons had renounced his Confederate past—as a teenage soldier, his motivations had been less than principled in any case—and at least tentatively embraced the idea of a new kind of equality between blacks and whites. He gradually came to advocate a role for black men in the Republican Party, but he was also alive to the erotic dimensions of the new order.

  Later, Parsons acknowledged that sex between blacks and whites was “sort of a custom in those days [in Waco, during Reconstruction],” that “such affairs were very common in Texas, and that no one paid any attention to them in those days.” He added, “I was wild when I was young, and had many escapades with girls.” In the town’s brothels, for a price, white men could have sex with black women. Yet Parsons’s words suggest a new, more profound openness in black and white male-female relations, especially between black women and white men, and he was not the only white man to disregard long-held customs. Schoolmaster Davis—by all accounts a good-looking man, with “black hair, full beard, [and] dark complexion”—was in the habit of escorting a young freedwoman around town, and seemed unfazed by the rumor that he had fathered a child by another black woman. One Waco resident later recalled that Lucia herself had “young bloods” running after her day and night who were attracted by “her hair and her shape.” Depending on their politics, Wacoites feared or welcomed what all perceived to be the dawning of a new day in Texas, one that broke taboos by making public what were heretofore private relationships.31

  The federal government seemed to be the institutional harbinger of this n
ew day. In March 1867, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, which enfranchised black men in the former Confederate states and moved swiftly to nullify state Black Codes and other discriminatory statutes. The subsequent reorganization of the South into five military districts prompted a fresh wave of violence in Texas. Furious at the emergent Republican Party, whites in McLennan County reacted violently to the appointment and election of former Unionists to political office. Although Central Texas counties were home to only 4 percent of the state’s population, between 1865 and 1868 the region accounted for 12 percent of all blacks killed by whites in the state, with most of the murders taking place in 1867 and 1868. One bureau agent summed up the gruesome reality: “The life of a [Union, or northern] white man is worth but little, the life of a Freedman is worth nothing.”32

  On July 10, 1867, the first day of voter registration under Radical Reconstruction, Albert Parsons stood fifth in line with twenty other men, black and white, at the Waco registrar’s office. Other men toward the front of the line included well-to-do white men who had been born in Kentucky and Tennessee, indicating they had retained some affinity for border-state Unionism throughout the war. During that initial registration period, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent expressed alarm at the number of armed freedpeople who came marching into town from the surrounding countryside to register, bearing a red flag and frightening the white townspeople. He chalked up their performance not to a contemporary form of politicking (which it was), but to their “love of display.” By the time registration had ended in late August, 1,003 blacks and 877 whites had signed up to vote. Now constituting a majority of McLennan County voters, blacks proceeded to elect the thirty-eight-year-old blacksmith Shep Mullins as a delegate to the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1868–1869, and they would send freedmen to the state legislature in 1869. These startling developments, combined with the sight of black men carrying pistols and shouldering rifles, caused Wacoites of all political persuasions to anticipate all-out war if anyone discharged his gun, even accidentally, and yet the imperatives of self-defense would seem to require that black field hands no less than newly elected officials should remain armed and make a “display” of it.33