Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Eddins described Election Day in October 1872:

  The voting place in Marlin was the Bartlett building (now Marlin’s City Hall). It was protected by soldiers under orders of Judge Oliver “to assure a fair and impartial election.” Through two rows of soldiers, most of whom were Negroes, voters were about to pass to cast their ballots.

  Some of the county’s leaders saw through the scheme, which was to intimidate some voters and encourage others. They saw the gross injustice to fair-minded people and remonstrated, taking their appeal to Judge Oliver. The judge was adamant and insisted the soldiers were necessary for a “fair election.” Some of the citizens walked quietly away and, one by one, returned and, unobserved, mounted the roof of the court house, armed with rifles and pistols. From their position they held a commanding view of the voting place.

  By pre-arrangement, a few citizens, including J. D. Oltorf, an attorney, called upon Judge Oliver and asked that the soldiers be withdrawn. The judge insisted they were necessary and offered explanations—much to the exasperation of the citizens. Mr. Oltorf, after listening patiently, replied calmly in words to this effect: “All right Judge, if you persist in keeping the soldiers there, somebody is going to get hurt, perhaps killed. It is not known who will be the first to get killed, but you’ll be the second!”

  The bold action produced the desired result. The judge realized he was dealing with people whose tempers had been imposed upon too long. He withdrew the soldiers—and the election proceeded peacefully.22

  My great-grandfather, R. E. L. Tomlinson was ten years old and at the courthouse that day. In 1936, he would recount what happened in starker terms to a woman from the Federal Writers’ Project who was collecting oral histories during the Great Depression:

  [The blacks] were overbearing. I remember how when the men went to vote … at Marlin, they had to march between rows of Negro guards. How they were all set to win their men and how the white men came armed in order to fight, if need be, for their right to vote. There was a comparatively peaceful election before someone began shooting up near the square and most of the Negroes fled to the Brazos bottom, and the white men went on with their voting. After it was over, they held a celebration that night over their success. Bon-fires were lit and great was the rejoicing over the return of the white man to his right to vote.23

  Democratic candidates swept the election at every level. They took control of the state house of representatives and obtained a one-vote majority in the state senate. Republicans held on only where either African-Americans or German immigrants made up the majority. Oliver left office on January 1, 1873.24

  Davis had one year left on his term, but the writing was on the wall. The Republican party, and the North’s attempt to reform Texas, was over. Confederates had returned to power.25

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  You talk about slavery, it never begun until after we was supposed to be free.

  —Dave Byrd

  In 1872, Sarah Tomlinson’s health failed and she died at the age of fifty-three. Her children Gus, John, Eldridge, and R. E. L. were still living at the family home, while James and Emma lived in a cabin nearby. Her sons decided to keep the farm operating as a single unit, with each of them taking a share of the profits.1

  Later that year, James and Emma had a second son, Albert Perry Tomlinson, and Gus married the daughter of a planter who lived just down the road, Elizabeth Jane Landrum. Elizabeth’s father, Benjamin Landrum, had also moved from Alabama and operated a general store and post office. As a wedding gift, Benjamin gave the newlyweds land not far from Tomlinson Hill. The couple had their first daughter, Minnie Augustus, on September 9, 1873.2

  Whites were back in total control of Falls County, even though Davis remained governor. The Freedmen’s Bureau was gone, and a conservative Democrat had replaced Judge Oliver. Race relations were back to where whites liked them, according to local historians in 1947:

  There had been no great animosities engendered between the whites and blacks, because slave-owners and slaves understood each other. Frequently there was a deep affection between them. As far as known, there were no cruel and unfair slave-owners here. They realized their responsibilities to the slaves and treated them accordingly.

  Most of the Negroes continued to work for their masters. Albert Perry Tomlinson said Churchill Jones, one of the largest slave-owners, provided land for his ex-slaves, either giving it to them outright, or selling it to them on very easy terms.

  During the Reconstruction naturally the votes of Negroes were appealed to in many and, sometimes, unholy ways. They were given many wild and impractical promises by “carpet baggers” and schemers, most of whom were more interested in personal profit than the welfare of Negroes. Most of the Negroes, however, with confidence in their “white folks,” remained loyal and good citizens.

  Falls County’s problems with the Negroes were not extreme and white people, as a whole, cooperated to help them make the most of their opportunities. A few Negroes thrust themselves forward, impolitely, and prematurely, without respect to social aesthetics.3

  This so-called history has little basis in truth, but it was the predominant perspective held by the dominant race at the time. I have included it to demonstrate how a bigoted history can survive for generations. In an official history of Marlin, the Chamber of Commerce published the same myths in 1976:

  Carpetbaggers from the North joined scalawags at home to make life difficult. Reconstruction governments were established in the former Confederate States, which were governed as occupied territories. Agents of the Freedman’s [sic] Bureau were stationed in each county. E. J. Davis, the radical Republican governor of Texas, appointed Judge J. W. Oliver to preside over the district in a harsh and high-handed manner.

  [The county’s] large negro population, which became less involved in politics than in most counties, became a large, peaceable, and industrious part of the population.4

  Freedmen’s Bureau records, though, report dozens of attacks on blacks and identify the former slaveholders who abused them after emancipation. But local historians, who took pride in their slaveholding ancestry, had no interest in reviewing the records compiled by “carpetbaggers.”

  I learned early in life that whites abused African-Americans in the decades following slavery, and I knew that my ancestors most likely participated. But reading the Freedmen’s Bureau docket assigning names to both perpetrators and victims made it feel more concrete. Many of the African-Americans I’ve met in Falls County tell me that my ancestors didn’t know any better. But history tells me otherwise. The whites of Falls County read newspapers, which laid out the debate over civil rights, and yet chose to remain oppressors. The Declaration of Independence says civil rights are God-given, but after Reconstruction, Democratic lawmakers argued that states’ rights allowed them to deny civil rights to African-Americans. They claimed this authority by majority rule.

  Once in power, Democrats in 1873 eliminated the state police, the only organization that reliably protected African-Americans.5 Then Democrats unified the state militia and segregated the units, limiting the role of blacks, who were seldom called to duty.6

  The next step was to abolish the state school board and return authority to local boards. Democratic lawmakers banished the common curriculum and reduced the mandatory school year from ten months to four. Conservatives said teachers who worked other jobs for eight months of the year would become better educators. State lawmakers cut all general revenue funding for schools and took away the counties’ authority to levy school taxes.7

  To complete their task, the Thirteenth Legislature rewrote election laws to give authority for voter registration to county clerks, giving them the power to keep African-Americans from voting. Legislators also redrew the state’s political districts to keep blacks from winning elections.8 Conservatives also passed a law disqualifying anyone who could not read or write from serving on a jury, thereby giving the elite control of the civil justice process.9
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  All executive and legislative offices expired in April 1874, so lawmakers set an election for December 1873. Four constitutional amendments proposed to take away the governor’s authority to declare martial law, make the county tax assessor an elected official, increase the state supreme court from three to five seats, and prohibit the legislature from passing laws on local matters.10 For governor, Democrats nominated Richard Coke, a lawyer from Waco, a Confederate veteran, and a former state supreme court justice.11 The campaign began in September 1873.

  On the campaign trail, Davis painted the Democrats as unreconstructed secessionists and racists who wanted to take Texas back in time. He accused conservatives of kowtowing to the railroads and big corporations that exploited the poor, no matter the color of their skin. He promised to protect the civil rights of all Texans against oligarchy, corruption, and discrimination.12

  Richard Coke sounded all of the traditional themes of conservative Democratic politics. He called Davis and other Republicans traitors to Texas and scalawags. Coke said they had become tyrants over the state’s true citizens, imposing oppressive laws imported from the North. He called the state police an instrument of oppression and the public schools a patronage system to reward corrupt whites and ignorant blacks. He pounded home how taxes rose under the Republicans and fell when Democrats took back the legislature. Newspaper editors repeatedly portrayed Davis as the black man’s candidate, and therefore a threat to whites everywhere. They equated equality with the creation of a mixed-race, mongrel society.13

  When Texans went to the polls in December 1873, they voted without federal troops or state police. Black turnout dropped and white turnout increased. Coke won the election with 85,549 votes to Davis’s 42,663, and Democrats won every statewide office and took control of the legislature. The counterrevolution was complete.14

  MARLIN BECOMES A CITY

  Marlin grew rapidly in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Zenas Bartlett’s general store, Bartlett and Watkins, got new competition from another mercantile firm, Scruggs and Company. Visitors also had their choice of two, two-story hotels. The Outler House was built from hand-sawed boards and had a veranda across the front. Thomas Read built a new, fancier hotel on the northeast corner of Court Square. Both served as stagecoach stops until the Houston & Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1871.15

  In 1873, James D. Oltorf, the Tomlinson family attorney and Democratic crusader against Judge Oliver, became mayor. Oltorf was old friends with Coke, the new governor, both having practiced law in Falls and McLennan counties before the Civil War. Now that Democrats were back in control, they began devolving power back to local authorities.16

  Oltorf, who owned the biggest mansion in the city, set out to impose order on Marlin with new city regulations. In September 1874, the city council passed an ordinance imposing a five-dollar fine on anyone who played baseball within the city limits because it was “detrimental to the peace and quiet of people.” Oltorf’s nineteen-year-old son founded a weekly newspaper called the Moving Ball, which later became the Marlin Ball.17

  What bothered Oltorf the most was the condition of the city’s main square. A decade earlier, a mysterious fire had destroyed the old log courthouse. A new one was planned to replace it, but in that time the square became populated with bars and businesses that Oltorf despised. He issued a proclamation in 1875 to restore decorum:

  Whereas many of the old stone houses fronting on Court Square are occupied by a class of people who are wicked, filthy, ignorant, immoral, immodest, unchaste, miserably depraved and altogether reckless as to the rights of others … and a shame and disgrace to our otherwise respectable and growing city … I call upon the citizens to assist in making the owners remove the terrible nuisance and stigma of disgrace that hangs over the Public Square of the city.18

  The city council, made up of the town’s wealthiest residents, passed a requirement that only the owners of buildings on the square could occupy them, unless they received written permission from the mayor. Once the city had cleared the riffraff, the county began work on a new brick courthouse.19

  Marlin also saw schoolhouses begin to pop up. In his role as the Falls County historian, Roy Eddins wrote:

  It is known that soon after Reconstruction, a revival of interest in education arose dramatically. Children, young and old—and parents—flocked to available schools. Many new people arrived in the county and educational demands skyrocketed. The free Negroes posed problems, because they are unaccustomed to “going to school” and were reluctant to go. This discouraged people in providing schools for them. However, by 1875, education in the county was receiving it’s [sic] just attention and schools arose rapidly.”20

  Eddins again showed his bias. Modern historians know that one-third of black families sent at least one child to school, if one was available.21 But most schools were private and expensive. In a brochure, the Marlin Male and Female Academy advertised that school would open January 14, 1874 for the following fees: spelling, reading, and writing at two dollars per month; intermediate classes at three dollars per month; Latin, Greek, algebra, science at four dollars per month; and additional incidental charges for music, piano, and guitar lessons at fifty cents per session. The city’s elite did not bother with such “subscription schools” and sent their children to boarding schools back east or in Europe.22

  The state’s wealthiest residents did not mind paying for a quality education for their own children, but they objected to paying taxes to educate other people’s children, particularly blacks. State law, however, required counties to provide public schools, and Falls County announced it would open one in 1875. William Shelton, the owner of the Marlin Male and Female Academy, shuttered his private school and announced his building was for rent or sale. County commissioners hired Shelton, who helped them apply for funding from the Peabody Foundation to set up a new school system that rented his own school. The Marlin schools were still not completely free, but they were cheaper than before. Shelton went on to serve as mayor.23

  As the western Falls County community grew larger, whites established churches and schools in the 1870s, but the Tomlinson Negro School was the only one for African-Americans. The Tomlinson Hill cotton gin was on a hill above the school, and the children would collect surplus seed for their parents to plant on their private plots the following season.24

  Communication could be difficult for white teachers in African-American schools. Folklore tells a story about a young teacher who found her black students confused by simple math. A boy finally interpreted what she was trying to say, suggesting that instead of saying, “bring down your one, and carry your two,” tell the children to “bring down your one, and tote the two.”25

  After the success of her black school, Henrietta Gassaway established the Beulah School for whites in 1870 on the other side of Tomlinson Hill. The small one-room log cabin doubled as a church. Billy Magee, the son of a local Baptist preacher and cotton planter, taught during the week and preached on Sundays. The Magees were the Tomlinsons’ closest white neighbors.26

  Benjamin Shields operated a general store in western Falls County, far from Marlin, in the early 1870s, selling basic supplies, clothing, and shoes. In 1870, twenty-eight landowners, including William Etheridge, established Masonic Temple No. 330 and began holding routine meetings, which the Tomlinson men joined.27

  On Tomlinson Hill, Gus Tomlinson built a home for his wife, Elizabeth, and their children. Elizabeth inherited sixty-three acres from her father’s estate, and they managed the black workers on that land as well, raising cotton and cattle. They lived on Tomlinson Hill until 1883, when Gus purchased a large farm near Lott, five miles away.28

  Gus’s younger brother, John Nicholas Tomlinson, married Christian McPherson in 1872. The two had their first child, Mary, the same year. They lived in the main house with James’s growing family and the youngest Tomlinson boy, R. E. L. In 1874, John and Christian had a second daughter, whom they named Sarah, after John’s mother, but they call
ed her Sallie. James met “an untimely death” just before Christmas 1875, at the age of twenty-five.29 History does not record the cause.

  A NEW KIND OF SLAVERY

  With control of the legislature, the governor’s office, and the state supreme court, Democrats rewarded their supporters by passing the Landlord and Tenant Act, which gave planters the first claim on a tenant farmer’s crop. The law allowed the landowner to have the sheriff seize a sharecropper’s property to pay for debts.30 Democrats also passed laws requiring segregated schools and allowing local school boards to operate African-American schools any way they wished.31

  Democrats also wanted a new constitution. They organized a third constitutional convention in the fall of 1876 to further decentralize power by creating more elected offices and giving more authority to county officials. They also cut the governor’s salary, ensuring that only the wealthy could afford to hold the post, and diminished the office’s patronage powers. The new constitution limited the authority of the legislature to tax and issue debt and required judges to run for election. Lastly, the constitution of 1876 made it almost impossible to make a significant change to state law without voters approving a constitutional amendment. Voters approved it 136,666 to 56,653. The Texas Democratic Party retained unmitigated control over the state for the next one hundred years, and the constitution of 1876 continues to govern Texas today.32

  FINDING REFUGE

  While white Texans rebuilt their communities following Reconstruction, African-Americans built new ones from scratch. Many continued to live in the same one-room cabins and shacks they had built while enslaved, but now they paid rent for these dilapidated structures, which often housed seven or eight people in two small rooms. Others established villages on the outskirts of white areas, knowing that white society would not accept them. Small villages with churches, shops, and other services sprang up in river bottoms, along property lines, or in places where white landowners tolerated them. These places became known as “freedom colonies,” where African-Americans could develop their own American culture.