In this feverish environment, black parents showed considerable courage in sending their children to the school opened by David Davis in the spring of 1866, the first of its kind. Forty-nine pupils—twenty-nine girls and twenty boys—commenced their studies in a primitive, windowless structure with a dirt floor and no benches or blackboard. Before long, Davis was boasting to his superiors that “what I have cannot be surpassed, I think, in point of scholarship by any colored school in the South.” Still, in December of that year, only twenty-five pupils were attending regularly, at least partly because of the great demand for hands in the cotton fields. It is possible, too, that the Waco Manufacturing Company, a local cotton and woolen mill, had hired large numbers of children among its one hundred employees. Another impediment to attendance was the $1.50 a month that Davis charged, much more than most manual workers and cotton pickers could afford. Lucia Carter was one of a handful of the privileged few, for Oliver Benton paid for her books and tuition and so she was able to attend consistently. (She was probably among the four or five girls over the age of sixteen who were recorded on Davis’s monthly attendance sheet for much of 1867 and 1868.) According to a reporter who interviewed Benton, “he was proud of his handsome wife, and aspired to lift her to as high a place as he could.”34
Davis the teacher had arrived in Waco at the behest of a friend in the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he found himself decidedly out of place among white Southerners. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College, he had worked for the US Army’s quartermaster department from 1863 to 1865, coming to Waco at the end of the war. He wrote poetry and followed a brand of spiritualism that set him apart from his southern-born, business-oriented Baptist and Methodist neighbors—he urged his Republican allies to “hug fast to the vital force,” which would eventually “bury the old ideas.” Like Parsons the typesetter, he harbored greater aspirations than his lowly title—in this case schoolteacher—would imply.35
Sometime between December 1867 and November 1868, Lucia Carter became pregnant. (Her baby was born between August 1868 and July 1869.) By this time, several older men had come into her life. Her teacher, Davis, apparently developed a close relationship with at least one unnamed freedwoman. In September 1868, when bureau agent Charles Haughn learned that Davis was a candidate for registrar of voters, an appointed office, he wrote to his superiors reporting that “Mr. Davis is a man of good intellect and education, but is not a man of good morals. Mr. Davis has been seen walking in the streets of Waco frequently in the company of a f. w. [freedwoman] and a f.w. here has a child and the evidences are so very strong against Davis that I have not the slightest doubt that the child is his.” Haughn said this scandalous state of affairs was public knowledge, and that he had given Davis a chance “to clear his name, but to no purposes.” Whether or not Davis was smitten with his pupil Lucia Carter is unknown, but it is certainly possible.36
Oliver Benton considered Lucia his wife, and he claimed that her baby was his; if she was not infatuated or in love with Benton, then she was at least beholden to him for her schooling. She was still working on and off as a cook in the homes of prominent white families, furthering her informal education in well-equipped kitchens and well-appointed parlors. One employer was Oscar H. Leland, a native of Vermont, who served as the chief officer for the Internal Revenue Service in Waco.37
Although the precise moment when Albert and Lucia first laid eyes on each other is unknown, the small circle of Republicans in Waco provided ample opportunities for them to meet. Trustees of the school she attended were also prominent Republicans, and at least some of them lived near her and her mother in the River Street section of town. Oscar Leland would serve as Albert Parsons’s boss once Parsons assumed the role of assistant assessor. According to Wacoites interviewed years later, the youthful Lucia Carter had no trouble attracting attention from men, black and white, who saw her as smart and beautiful. As a teenager, then, she learned the power of her own special allure.
DAVID DAVIS AND ALBERT PARSONS COMPETED FOR INFLUENCE within the emerging Republican Party. Davis had set about organizing blacks for the Republican Party as early as May 1867, appearing at political rallies in Waco. Parsons cast his net considerably wider. He tried his hand at publishing a Republican newspaper, Spectator, but, as he admitted himself, it was “short-lived, in a community of overwhelming opposition.” He was much more successful as an orator than as an editor. Of his years stumping for the party across the state, he wrote, with some understatement, “My political career was full of excitement and danger.” He added, with what would eventually be revealed as characteristic bombast, “The lately enfranchised slaves over a large section of country came to know and idolize me as their friend and defender, while on the other hand I was regarded as a political heretic and traitor by many of my former associates.” In his autobiography Parsons vaingloriously referred to the loyalty shown him by “a multitude of ignorant but devoted blacks.” He forever remained self-consciously proud of his own formidable speaking skills; despite his small stature (he estimated his weight at 135 pounds at the time), he had the physical endurance and rhetorical capacity to hold a massive crowd in his thrall for hours at a time. Standing on any kind of platform he could find, he would lecture, cajole, and berate his listeners, no matter how hot and humid the day. In the words of one who knew him in his Republican days, he was “an incessant talker.”38
For the most part, Parsons’s white neighbors held their tongues while he became a fixture in the town and in the statewide Republican Party. They hesitated to make too much trouble: federal troops were headquartered in their midst, and by this time the local police force included some black officers, who wore their blue uniforms proudly and carried weapons. At one point, John T. Flint, a banker and railroad entrepreneur, a big man, became fed up with Parsons, accosting him with a five-pound piece of iron cogwheel and causing him to fall down a flight of stairs, bloodying his face. Looking back decades later, white Wacoites described Parsons this way: “A violent agitator, affiliating with the worst class of Negroes,… ever ready to stir them up to strife.” The Galveston Daily News, Parsons’s first employer, saw fit to print the charge that “he was always on hand at the gatherings of Negroes, eager for fame and notoriety among them, seeking every opportunity to be seen and heard, parading before them the great wrongs they had suffered and the rights denied them by their political opponents, and inciting them to regard all white people as enemies except such as he would affiliate with them as he was doing.” Such an indictment spoke to Parsons’s familiarity with black leaders and voters.39
In June 1868, Texas Constitutional Convention delegates convened in Austin to rewrite the state’s constitution according to federal Reconstruction mandates. Among those in attendance was Shep Mullins, who by this time had served in a variety of appointed positions, including that of county commissioner. The new state constitution, ratified in 1869, provided for the increased power of the state government, support for black education, and the permanent franchise for black men. These developments lifted Albert Parsons’s spirits, and in early 1869 he embarked on a new venture as a traveling correspondent for a newspaper started by his brother, who had settled in Houston—the Houston Weekly/Daily Telegraph. The new job allowed Parsons to combine the role of journalist with that of Radical Republican activist.
After the war, William Parsons had made a brief sojourn to British Honduras, where he planned to establish a colony for Southerners hoping to hold onto their slaves. When he returned to Texas he tested the political waters by attending an 1868 conservative state convention. Its avowed purpose was to prevent “the Africanization of the state.” Before too long, though, William apparently recognized the potential financial gains to be had by working within a party that promoted the use of taxpayer dollars to subsidize business interests of various kinds. (A Democratic detractor complained that the general had, “all at once, in a twinkling of an eye, flopped over” to the Republicans.) He then initiated contact
with state Republican leaders and offered to reach out to former Confederates—“many old army friends”—and, with himself as an example, make the case for a graceful transition from secessionist Democrat to Reconstruction Republican. Egalitarian-minded blacks and whites alike were suspicious of William—especially those who had known him back in the day, when he had defined “Negro subordination” as “the only natural relation of the race… the only sphere in which their happiness and destiny can be subserved.” Presumably William would promote the notion that, in the words of another white Republican, “the Republican Party is not a black man’s party any more than a white.” William aimed to use his newspaper as an organ of the conservative (i.e., pro-business, anti–black rights) wing of the Texas Republican Party.40
As a roving reporter, Albert Parsons was now in his element, traversing the state on horseback, sending the Telegraph periodic dispatches—which he called “Letters from Waco”—and selling subscriptions to the paper. He also worked as an agent for the St. Louis Life Insurance Company. Apparently during these trips he was combining his role as reporter (and life insurance agent) with that of party organizer—a tricky combination, given his interest in currying favor among the freedmen, on the one hand, and retaining the support of his brother-boss, who was insensitive to the plight of blacks in general, on the other. On his Central Texas speaking tours, he traveled with associates whom he described as “one or two intelligent colored men”—Mullins was probably one of them. Their presence no doubt enhanced his credibility when he spoke to large crowds of freedpeople. Not surprisingly on these trips Parsons found himself “completely ostracized from my former [white] associates”: “At noontime or nightfall our fare was only such as could be had in the rude and poverty-stricken huts of the colored people. I ate at their table with them, and slept in the same room as the huts rarely had but one room. This was a degree of self-degradation in the eyes of the whites, which rendered me odious.”41
Two decades later, Parsons would reminisce about those public meetings in a way that suggested his own high regard for himself, as well as his role as the proverbial outside agitator: “And often have I, amid the rows of slave huts, at night, stood upon a bale of cotton as a platform, and by the faint light of a tallow dip harangued the hundreds assembled around me. What a scene! The stars shone brightly above; a somber, heavy darkness covered the earth’s surface—peculiar to Southern swamp regions; the flickering light of the tallow dip; the mass of upturned, eager faces, coal black, with shining eyes embedded in sparkling white, with uncovered heads (but few possessed hats).” Such was his listeners’ first school, and he their first teacher of “lessons of political economy.” On other days Parsons would speak at the local courthouse, such as the one in Waco, and black men, women, and children would come in from the countryside, riding mules or horses or on foot. Of these meetings, attended by as many as a thousand people at a time, he wrote, “The new-born manhood was aroused and they were stirred with new sensations of independence and self-respect.” In his view, he had given hope to the downtrodden, a work he pursued “with the ardor and disinterestedness of an apostle.” On the streets of Waco and on the plains and in the cotton fields of Central Texas, Parsons honed his fearless style and felt the exhilaration that flowed from taunting arrogant, well-armed enemies.42
On March 1, 1869, Parsons sent to the Houston paper a “Letter from Waco” in which he claimed that the “most intelligent and influential citizens” held Republican sympathies—a dubious proposition, but one calculated to boost the spirits of his beleaguered comrades-in-arms. He reported that Central Texas was in a flourishing condition, with ranchers and farmers prospering. He approvingly recounted a recent incident in Waco in which a black man was sentenced to be hanged for murder, explaining, “Though our sympathies are enlisted in behalf of these erring children of humanity, yet it is a source of gratification and pride also to note these evidences of determination by our people to enforce the law upon the guilty, that innocence may be protected.” Reflecting his brother’s views, if not his own, he advocated increased state spending on bridges and railroads. At the same time he called upon Democrats and moderate Republicans to “unite to close out” of power “a Radical white man or an unlettered negro.” Parsons had either imbibed his brother’s brand of Republicanism or was cynically appealing to whites who could not abide the thought of joining a party that included freedmen. Certainly in his perambulations around the state he had spoken to many as a “Radical white man” himself.43
In an unusual departure for this budding politician, who at the time was just twenty-three years of age, at the end of the piece he abruptly shifted his focus from politics to herald a different kind of progress he saw in Waco; “solid and substantial buildings” were not the only noteworthy improvements there. He pointed to the domestic pleasures that the town afforded; it was a place now displaying “a refined and cultivated taste.” He described “front yards to dwellings, laid off in plots and decorated with shrubbery and flowers, porticoes trellised and ready for the cumbering honeysuckles and morning glory, tastefully painted gate and paling fence and sidewalk, made cool and inviting from the summer heat by the shade from bois de arc and sycamore.” These refinements indicated that Wacoites were “‘making home attractive,’ and by its comfort, beauty and adornment, [they] realise that it is to them the dearest spot on earth.”44
Such uncharacteristic musings on the virtues of domestic bliss suggest that by this time Parsons had met Lucia Carter. In his autobiography (published in 1886), he claimed that he had indeed met her in 1869—but, he wrote, he had done so while serving as “travelling correspondent and agent” in northwestern Texas for the Telegraph. Later, he and Lucia, now called Lucy, would together conspire to offer up the fiction that she had been a “charming young Spanish-Indian maiden” living with her uncle on a ranch near Buffalo Creek in Johnson County. But by locating their meeting in 1869, Albert thereby confirmed, if only indirectly, that they had met around the time he wrote this particular “Letter from Waco.” At this point, she was either pregnant or the mother of an infant. Meanwhile, he had changed his residence, boarding in another household, perhaps the better to manage his private life away from the prying eyes of his older sister Mary.45
In the fall, as December elections loomed, Parsons’s public speeches took on added urgency. He rejoiced at the outcome of those elections: with black men enfranchised and many former Confederates either barred from voting or refusing to vote, Republicans captured virtually all the local and statewide offices. (Texas would be readmitted to the Union the following year.) The Radical Edmund J. Davis was elected governor. Mullins won a seat in the 12th legislative session. David Davis rode to office on this Republican sweep, becoming clerk of Waco’s district court. Parsons wasted little time excoriating Davis, charging that the teacher appointed deputies with only a tenuous attachment to the Republican Party. For his part, Davis claimed he wanted “no rebel officers, but a German, a Yankee, a true Southerner, & a colored man”—a none-too-subtle allusion to the rising prominence of not only Albert Parsons but also his brother William, two “rebel officers” now active in state politics.46
William Parsons had been elected to the 12th legislative session as a senator from Harris and Montgomery Counties, parlaying his influence as a Houston newspaper editor into political office. That session also included fourteen black senators and representatives (Mullins from McLennan County among them). The election results revealed a deeply divided party, with one faction opposing black civil rights but favoring state-sponsored business interests, and the other agitating for black rights, a statewide public school system, and a crackdown on antiblack violence. Contemplating his potential allies among the new lawmakers, Governor Davis looked favorably on William Parsons, a reliable “railroad man,” if one with malleable politics.47
It seems remarkable that Albert Parsons could pursue a career in Texas politics at the same time that he was ardently pursuing a young freedwoman in Wac
o. Certainly the relationship presented profound challenges for both of them; she was already entangled with Oliver Benton, and the birth of a baby further complicated matters. Yet as subsequent events would prove, Lucia and Albert together reveled in their own recklessness.
Chapter 2
Republican Heyday
IN THE EARLY 1870S, CARTER & CO. WAS DOING A FINE BUSINESS, catering to the modest householders and prosperous money-makers of Central Texas. The store, well situated on the main plaza of Waco, was owned by Edward H. Carter and his partner Champe C. McCulloch, and they advertised “cheaper Goods than anybody”—boots, locks, hinges, cutlery, glassware, gunpowder, plows, spades, hoes, chains. On most any day but the Sabbath, Carter & Co. could expect a noisy crowd picking over wares and haggling over prices, cowboys mingling with housewives and plantation managers. Meanwhile, in a storeroom above the din, an enduring love affair was beginning.1
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