William Marsh Rice and His Institute: The Centennial Edition

2: The War Years and Their Sequel

( 32 ) TheWarYears and Their Sequel Of Rice’s views on slavery nothing written has survived. Back in Springfield in the mid-1830s, that “peculiar institution” had been one of the issues most hotly debated in the discussion of Texas’ proposed entry into the United States. At the Asbury Chapel a resolution had even been passed during the Methodists’ Quarterly Conference in July 1835 to “close the chapel to all lectures on colonization and abolition”; but the opponents of slavery prevailed, and within a matter of days the society voted to rescind the resolution, after which antislavery discussions continued .1 Whatever William Marsh Rice’s sentiments may have been in Massachusetts, his actions reveal him to have been a realist first and last; as such, he could not ignore the economic facts of life in the Southwest. Southern capitalism took a different turn from that developed in the North. The Texas capitalist had two ingredients to work with, fresh lands and Negro slaves. Out of this land and forced labor he created newcapital, which almost universally was reinvested in more land and more slaves. . . . Few, if any, of these New England migrants who succeeded —as lawyers, doctors, merchants, or overseers—failed to acquire Negroes and set themselves up as Southern gentlemen.2 As one historian explains, “Many Texas planters involved themselves to some extent in developing railroads, and a few invested in manufacturing enterprises, but even for those men such ventures remained peripheral to planting.Texas’s leading capitalists maintained a firm commitment to agriculture, slavery, and southern agrarian values.”3 While Rice did not c ha p t e r t w o the war years and their sequel ( 33 ) join the single-minded pursuit of agriculture, he apparently did not object to the economic structures like slavery that sustained the state. Since Houston served an agricultural hinterland, his work as a merchant and an entrepreneur in and around that city tied him inextricably to Texas’s market-oriented agricultural economy.4 In the census of 1860 Rice is listed as owning fifteen enslaved blacks, some of whom he had acquired in default of payments, as he had some of his land holdings; others, the records show, he purchased outright. In 1847, against the sum of $889.58, one John Lewis of Montgomery County secured four slaves to the firm of Rice and Nichols; in 1861, at the trust sale of Amanda, aged seventeen years, Rice offered $1050 and purchased her.5 Like a number of the others, Amanda was most likely one of Margaret Bremond Rice’s house servants; there must also have been a need for slaves in the warehouses and on the wharves owned by Rice and his several partners.The DemocraticTelegraph and Texas Register reported in March 1851 that a black person belonging to the firm of Rice and Nichols had been brought to Houston from Galveston with symptoms of smallpox; a week later the paper followed up with the welcome news that there had been no further signs of the disease in the city.6 In 1848 Rice made a gift of “Ellen, 17, light black, and her infant child, Louisa, about 1,” to Frank Rice Nichols, Ebenezer Nichols’s son, out of “the love and affection” that Rice felt for the little boy.7 In his casual embrace of humans’ commodification, which was the essence of the slave system,William Rice epitomized the South’s variation on America’s pervasive system of capitalist markets. Over the protests of the aging Sam Houston, Texas voted itself out of the United States in March 1861 in defense of that system of slavery; it had already been admitted to the Confederacy that was being put together in Montgomery, Alabama.8 Some young men, like Rice’s nephew William A. Rice, one of those two sons whom David Rice had left behind in Massachusetts and who had joined his father and uncles in Texas in the early 1850s, had already gone back to the North.9 This William, like his cousin of nearly the same name, had his uncle to thank for his education at Wilbraham Academy and at Suffield Institute, and the two remained friends, although in the ironic pattern that characterized this war William remained loyal to the United States and enlisted in the 37th Massachusetts Volunteers, while his dashing brother, David Chapter two ( 34 ) King Rice, who in 1860 was living with uncle...