"This Blood-Thirsty Hole": The Freedmen's Bureau Agency at Clarksville, Texas, 1867-1868

"This Blood-Thirsty Hole": The Freedmen's Bureau Agency at Clarksville, Texas, 1867-1868 William L. Richter In the summer of 1867, the inhabitants of Texas and other Southern states witnessed a phenomenon in American history. Black men, who as little as two years earlier were legally classified as slave property, came into voting precincts and began registering to vote. It was a shock to Texas whites, one that these defeated Confederates often did not bear gracefully. Among those who were visibly angered by the new turn of events was Edward Rosser, who ran a large plantation in Bowie County. On August 21, Rosser and his brother, Marlin, met several of their contract hands on the Jefferson Road two miles south of Boston. As it was not Saturday, the Rossers knew that the men were on their way to register as voters in the upcoming selection of delegates to draft a new state constitution. The question of Negro voting aside, the whites were in an especially mean mood. Just two days earlier, another hand, Henry Rosser (or as Ed Rosser commonly called him, "Henry, that d—d son of a b—h"), had run away. When Marl caught Henry up in Arkansas, he brought the freedman back, promising to tie him to a tree and shoot him in front of the others for effect. Henry had jumped off Marl's horse at Walnut Creek crossing, however, and no one had seen the black man since. Marl only grinned when asked about Henry's disappearance. Henry would "dwell the balance of his days in the bottom of Red River Lake," laughed Marl. He bragged to the freedmen, "I got him . . . G-d The author would like to thank Bertha L. Gable of the Red River County Texas Genealogy Society; Thelma Duty McKinney of Fort Worth, Texas; June Tuck of Sulphur Springs, Texas; and EUa Swanson of the L.D.S. Family History Center, Tucson, Arizona, for their cheerful assistance in obtaining research materials for this article. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1, c 1992 by The Kent State University Press 52CIVIL WAR HISTORY d~n him," and opined that Henry "was on the Red River [being pecked by] the geese by this time."1 The freedmen nervously halted in front of the two mounted whites. Ed had a "big green stick." Marl had a holstered revolver. Marl growled about "some killing" that needed to be done. Ed nodded in agreement and stared at the freedmen, long and hard. Then he allowed as how he "would mawl [sic] them to death" if they continued on to the registration site. Ed reckoned that registration was a lot "like the marrying business." It was all Judge John Garland's doing. Garland, a Union loyalist during the Civil War and now a military appointee as registrar of voters, allegedly told all the freedmen after emancipation that they had to get married, pay fifty dollars, or serve two years in the state penitentiary. Ed figured that the judge was handling voter registration the same way. Ed said that if Garland did not watch out, "he would get forty buckshot in his ass___ Wonder someone had not done it before now," he mused. He then pointedly told the blacks that they "had twenty-five minutes to get those plows started or else." According to one witness, Marl backed up his brother's play promising that "he would put us in the same fix he put Henry in" if the blacks did not return to work immediately. The freedmen did not register that day.2 But Edward Rosser would not go unpunished. One of his hands managed to sneak into the registrar later and report the incident. Garland turned the matter over to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, a quasi-military agency charged with the task of easing and speeding the transition of the former slaves into free American citizens endowed with equal civil rights, administering plantation lands abandoned during the war, and assisting loyal refugees to return home for a new start. Although the bureau was a part of the War Department, it possessed a semi-independent command system consisting of a commissioner...