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Chapter 7 Endeavoring to Wrong, Cheat, and Defraud Her [The] plaintiff is a poor, ignorant, and unlearned [N]egress, decrepit with age, in feeble health and greatly needing the property withheld from her. —William H. Hamman, Assaline Hearne vs. H. D. Prendergast In the fall of 1874, three months after the rendering of the judgment against Azeline Hearne in the Hall case, fifty male citizens of the Empire of China appeared in the Robertson County District Court. The Chinese immigrants, who were formerly railroad workers, declared that they were over twenty-one years of age and had continuously lived and worked in California and Texas for more than five years. Republican-appointed Judge John Rector, upon hearing them swear to bear true faith and allegiance to the United States, granted them citizenship despite their ineligibility under federal law. Present were the county’s leading Republican officeholders: District Clerk Conrad Anschicks, Sheriff Frank Hall, and District Attorney Isaac Ellison. Anschicks was under separate criminal indictments for swindling and for the rape of an under-ten black girl whom he had employed in his grocery store; Hall faced charges of embezzlement due to his neglect as sheriff to collect the county school tax; and Ellison was responsible for prosecuting the cases against both of them. Enormous attention centered on Anschicks, who with the help of Judge Rector got his rape case transferred to the district court from the Calvert Police Court, 194 Counterfeit Justice 1. Naturalization of Ah Cong [and forty-nine others from the Empire of China], [October Term, 1874], Book “M,” pp. 241–42, and The State of Texas vs. Conrad Anschicks, Case No. 880, “Swindling,” February 24, 1874, Book “M,” pp. 3–4, and The State of Texas vs. Conrad Anschicks, Case No. 1136, “Rape,” June 12, 1874, Book “M,” p. 71, MDC, Robertson County, Texas; Luella Gettys, The Law of Citizenship in the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. 62–69; The State of Texas vs. F. M. Hall, Case No. 1264, “Embezzlement ,” Criminal Court, [December Term, 1875], notation by William H. Hamman in “Memoranda ” notebook, box 1, folder 5, and “Petition to the State Senate & House of Representatives from Citizens of Robertson County,” [undated] (quotation), box 2, folder 30, William Harrison Hamman Papers, WRC-RU, Houston, Texas; and Norman L. McCarver and Norman L. McCarver Jr., Hearne on the Brazos (San Antonio: Century Press of Texas, 1958), p. 57. 2. Manuscript Election Returns for 1874, Folder for Robertson County, box 2–12/580, Secretary of State Records, RG 307, TSL-AD; J. W. Baker, A History of Robertson County, Texas (Waco, Tex.: Printed by Texian Press, 1970), p. 363 (quotation); and [Entries on contested election involving relocation of the county seat], vol. 2, Calvert, Texas, [May 1873–March 1876], June 2, 1875, pp. 235–36, CCM-PM, Robertson County, Texas. 3. Richard Coke, “Message from the Governor” [handwritten], p. 4, March 16, 1874 (quotations ), box 96, folder 50, Governors’ Papers: Coke, RG 301, TSL-AD. where a jury had wanted to “punish him capitally.” As for the Chinese Texans, they subsequently registered to vote just in time for the off-year congressional elections.1 Democratic victories in the November balloting statewide were all but guaranteed. Republicans could no longer rely on help from Austin to rein in intimidation of black voters. Nevertheless, the Republican vote in Robertson County, although prevailing only in the Calvert precinct and falling over five hundred votes shy of carrying the county, was comparatively respectable . In addition, and helping to boast voter turnout, in a countywide referendum Calvert survived a strong challenge from Englewood (located south of Owensville) to become the new county seat. The close outcome caused some disappointed white residents from the interior and eastern side of the county to level charges that “the Negroes and scalawags who voted in Hearne and Calvert stole the election.” A subsequent public investigation found their charges to be unsubstantiated.2 After the 1874 congressional elections, Democratic governor Richard Coke grumbled about “unscrupulous tricksters and demagogues,” namely, scalawags and carpetbaggers, who continued to govern many East Texas counties by hoodwinking “unenlightened black voters.” In spite of Governor Coke’s disgust with blacks enjoying equal privileges with whites “at the ballot box and in the jury box,” the freedmen in Robertson County, as in many other heavily black-populated counties in the lower Brazos River Valley, continued to play a role in the calculus of local partisan political outcomes for the next twenty...

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