Representative Men: The Post-Civil War Political Struggle over Texas’s Commissioners to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition

This chromolithograph shows a bird’s-eye view of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

“There are thousands of Democrats up North who are first rate fellows and if they desire to see Texas at the Centennial we would like to gratify them . . . [but] it is not to be expected that a respectable lady like Texas would enter the festivities on the arm of a satyr like Parsons.”

—The Brenham Banner, Sept. 17, 1875

This was the acerbic reaction of one Democratic Texas news paper, The Brenham Banner, to the presence of a Republican politician, William Henry Parsons, on the National Centennial Commission, the body responsible for planning and organizing the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, more commonly referred to simply as “The Centennial,” a grand world’s fair and hundredth birthday party for the United States of America planned for May through November of 1876 in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. The commission comprised one commissioner and one alternate from each state or territory, who were appointed by the president upon the nomination of each state’s or territory’s governor.

A central theme of the festivities was post-Civil War sectional amity; as the United States Centennial Almanac (1874) put it, the aim was to make the Centennial “a work of pride, of patriotism, and reconciliation.”¹ There has been valuable work in recent years on white southern attitudes towards reunion by scholars such as Anne Sarah Rubin, David Blight, and Caroline Janney, but the little that has been written on the Centennial exhibition has not yet analyzed what the event meant to Americans. Historian John Hepp has recently pointed out the “numerous opportunities” that the celebrations of 1876 hold for scholarship.² This article engages one of those opportunities through using the controversy over Texan representation on the National Centennial Commission as a case study of white southern engagement with the Centennial exhibition and the ways in which this was tied in with questions of politics and power at the state level.

While planning for the Centennial was in its early stages, William Henry Parsons, who would serve as a Texas Centennial commissioner, addressed an open letter to Texans that reflected the desire of the exhibition’s organizers that the celebration be a national one, designed to help heal sectional wounds:

We assume that the celebration of the 100th Anniversary of American Independence is neither a sectional nor a party question, but one that should enlist the sympathy, excite the patriotism and ensure the cooperation of all sections and all parties of our common country. It has been with this view, evidently, that the Governor of Texas nominated, and the President of the United States appointed, the Commissioners for Texas—selecting one from each of the two political parties in the State.³

Parsons’s hopes were unfulfilled: Texas, along with all but two other southern states (Arkansas and Mississippi), failed to appropriate any funds to mount an exhibit at Fairmount Park and, uniquely, ended up with two competing sets of National Centennial Commissioners, nominated by consecutive governors who were bitter political rivals. The furor over the commissionerships provided the impetus for widespread public discussion of the Centennial and the part, if any, that Texas should play in it. The Republican “satyr,” William Parsons, was appointed by Republican Texas governor Edmund Davis, along with Democrat John Chew, to represent the state on the National Centennial Commission. After Davis was defeated by Democrat Richard Coke in December 1873, the new governor attempted to replace Parsons and Chew with two Democrats, Alfred Hobby and J. W. Jennings. Parsons and Chew fought a months-long battle to retain their positions, and this struggle provides not only a trenchant vignette of the partisan divide around an ostensibly national and reconciliatory commemoration but of the ways in which the language of “representative men” was used to shore up the political...