Beyond Redemption: Texas Democrats after Reconstruction

Introduction: South by Southwest

introduction South by Southwest o n the morning of september 28, 1874, federal troops under the command of col. Ranald mackenzie overran a sprawling encampment of comanches, kiowas, and cheyennes in palo duro canyon,where a fork of the Red River cuts into texas’high plains.Although only a few indians died in the engagement,the rout doomed any prospect that these native peoples might yet enjoy of an independent existence beyond the confines of indian territory. mackenzie’s men put the indians’villages to the torch,seized a winter’s worth of food and fodder,and slaughtered over one thousand of their horses. the indians of the southern plains had in 1867 agreed to base themselves in indian territory but had insisted on their right to hunt buffalo elsewhere. enraged by white hunters’decimation of the bison,the federal government’s failure to provide adequate alternate sustenance at their agencies, and depredations of their own stock, bands of comanches, kiowas, and southern cheyennes had in 1874 gone to war in western texas and kansas. palo duro represents the most decisive moment in the army’s counterinsurgency campaign—a campaign that represented the deathblow to native resistance on the southern plains. sporadic raiding continued through the end of the decade, but the danger of any comprehensive threat from plains indians to euro-American expansion in texas had certainly ended.1 A mere eight months before palo duro, texas had passed another milestone . With a bristling of arms though not actual bloodshed, democrats had forced the Republican governor, edmund J. davis, from the capitol in Austin—a moment usually taken to mark Reconstruction’s end in the state. in the language of the day, texas had been “redeemed,” its deliverance the work of“Redeemer democrats.”2 those democrats assembled the following year to write their party’s triumph over Reconstruction into the organic law of the state. their constitutional convention followed closely on the heels of the final surrender of Quanah’s holdout band of Quahadi comanches. that 2฀ beyond฀redemption very same summer of 1875, the Rio Grande borderlands passed a milestone of their own.mexican authorities arrested Juan cortina,the tamaulipas caudillo , alleged rustler of American cattle, and would-be tribune of oppressed tejanos, who had roiled south texas since 1859. the transnational rapine and reprisal that texans associated with cortina had grown endemic in the early 1870s. But with the ascension after 1875 of porfirio diaz as mexico’s leader, raiding along the border diminished.3 Within these same two years of 1874–75,then,texas had reached turning points in its history as a western, southern, and borderlands state. yet these regional histories have often been studied in isolation from one another. the western dimensions of postbellum texas loom large in the popular imagination,what with decade upon decade of myth-making about cattle drives and gunfights. But its southern aspects—the experience texas shared with other slaveholding states that joined the confederacy—have, along with the south texas borderlands, probably garnered more scholarly attention in recent decades. in all but a few of these works, the world of African American slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction could seem very distant indeed from the worlds of palo duro or Juan cortina.4 that the scholarship of southern, western, and borderlands texas seem often to exist independently of one another should by no means suggest their respective inadequacy.the distance between“southern”and“western”texas was literally quite vast in the 1870s,as indicated by the fact that the first comprehensive report about the battle at palo duro to appear in the state’s most widely circulated newspaper had to be reprinted from the New York Herald. An earlier brief report also came via new york (interestingly, the Galveston Daily News of that date gives considerably more attention to the prospect of a border war sparked by cortina).5 Being so far flung, texas’ component parts can, therefore, be reasonably studied as entities unto themselves. each possessed distinctive histories of settlement, sustained distinctive populations ,and supported distinctive ways of life.the piney woods (and in places red dirt) of east texas would have seemed familiar to many migrants from the southeast. slave-based plantation agriculture there had concentrated in those areas most accessible to Red River trade routes but also thrived along the lower Brazos, colorado, and trinity rivers near the Gulf coast. some of these plantation counties also sustained large commercial stockraising operations on the flat coastal prairie laying...