The University of North Carolina Press
Reviewed by:
  • Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor: James Webb Throckmorton, and: Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Governor
Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor: James Webb Throckmorton. By Kenneth Wayne Howell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Pp. 196. Cloth, $29.95.)
Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Governor. By Carl H. Moneyhon. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2010. Pp. 274. Cloth, $27.95.)

The inaugural issue of this journal affords an opportunity to assess Reconstruction scholarship by means of two scholarly biographies of [End Page 126] Texas governors. Kenneth Wayne Howell examines the Presidential Reconstruction governor James Throckmorton, while Carl H. Moneyhon assesses his successor, the Radical Republican Edmund J. Davis. These are both good books, but one might term them Texas-centric, which makes the insights of less importance than they might otherwise be.

Throckmorton was elected governor in 1866, to be removed from office the following year by the military; he was perhaps the most racially reactionary of all the Presidential Reconstruction governors, a consistency that served him well politically after Redemption. This, however, is not Howell's primary point; he depicts Throckmorton as the developmentminded tribune of the small farmers of the North Texas frontier. In the author's conceptualization, "class conflict" explains a lot; it generated "resentment toward slaves who represented the most visible sign of the planters' wealth" (3). Throckmorton nonetheless remained in step with white Texan attitudes toward blacks and Native Americans. One conspicuous exception bears mention: he stood with Governor Sam Houston against disunion, providing one of a handful of Union votes in the secession convention. Afterward, Throckmorton backed Confederate values with zeal, sanctioning the mass execution of forty suspected Unionist plotters in his vicinity in 1862 and the repression of freedpeople after emancipation. Here, too, the author reads Throckmorton's postwar racial animus as largely growing out of his distaste for planters; the argument is that he favored black codes to immobilize the freedmen and deter their migration to northern Texas.

Howell's biography does have the virtue of having something to say. The author emphasizes that Throckmorton's region was settled by small farmers from the upper South, and he interprets Throckmorton as reflecting their alienation from the planters' rule. I am not a specialist in North Texas history, but it seems to me this interpretive theme is being ridden hard. For example, the author emphasizes the strength of the Whig Party; but if that party generally racked up an anemic 30 percent of the region's vote, as Howell states (23), the point is that Throckmorton was successful before a predominantly Democratic electorate. There are other counterintuitive interpretations too. His discussion of the Texas secession declaration is accurate, but it understates the extravagant racist tone that makes it prosecution exhibit A in current controversies over the Confederate legacy. Howell flatly observes that "as a prewar Unionist, Throckmorton should have embraced the Republican party" (xiv), but all his antisecession viewpoint implied was prescience about what war would do to the slaveholding South. It seems odd to suggest otherwise, since Howell calls Throckmorton a white supremacist throughout the book. One suspects [End Page 127] the author wants to take a more sympathetic view of his subject but is brought up short by the necessity of periodic admission of his racism, and the effect is rather jarring.

On the other hand, Carl Moneyhon's biography of Throckmorton's successor displays no such ambivalence. In the introduction, Moneyhon refers to Governor Edmund J. Davis as "the hero he most certainly was" (xi), and in the book's final line, Davis's name is said to be "written on the 'brightest page' of Texas history" (274). One might be tempted to scoff at such statements, but the evidence sustains a favorable modern evaluation. Davis may have been the most morally admirable scalawag leader in the South. He progressed in straightforward fashion from antisecessionist, to Union officer, to Radical Republican governor. He was a brave man; even his resolute wife defied death threats for her refugee husband's Union stand. Davis demonstrated early and consistent support for something like legal equality and voting rights for the freedmen, though how he came to this position the author finds a mystery. If one disregards Davis's views toward Native Americans on the frontier, which tended toward the genocidal, his goals seem admirable. As governor, his priority seems to have been suppression of violence against the freedpeople, through militia and police measures, with substantial effect. Governor Davis, moreover, was personally honest and resistant to the corporate blandishments Republicans experienced elsewhere. Indeed, Texas's major railroad subsidies passed over his opposition, with the emphatic support of Democrats like former governor Throckmorton.

Beyond the basically plausible argument that Davis was an attractive person, the book has other virtues. Reconstruction politics in Texas was unusually complicated. Focusing on just one Radical Republican politician allows readers to grasp the intractable ab initio controversy, over the legal status of wartime legislation, and the proposal to separate Texas into several states; these two perplexing issues derailed the constitutional convention for a year, and the author simplifies the matter well. Moneyhon is fortunate in that Davis probably has more interpretive significance than Throckmorton. Here, however, is the major liability of this work. From such an experienced scholar, one expects more reflection on what Davis's career suggests about southern politics, scalawags, and the Reconstruction literature more broadly. If so admirable a leader received only hatred from the bulk of white citizens, the implications for a positive outcome seem grim. Texas represents a multiethnic variant on the Reconstruction saga, with a frontier time lag thrown in, and these aspects could have been mined for wider implications. Both books needed to engage with what these men's careers have to say about the Civil War era. Neither work seems inclined to [End Page 128] reach possible readers halfway; neither provides a map of Texas for readers, or its proliferating railroad network, despite the interpretive significance of geography for both arguments.

In sum, both of these good works would have profited from more intellectual ambition. Historians ought to be interested in Reconstruction Texas, but the authors might help them see why.

Michael W. Fitzgerald

Michael W. Fitzgerald is professor of history at St. Olaf College and the author, most recently, of Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South (2007).

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