Still the Arena of Civil War: Violence and Turmoil in Reconstruction Texas, 1865-1874

Chapter 9: “A Free and Outspoken Press”: Coverage of Reconstruction Violence and Turmoil in Texas Newspapers, 1866–1868

267 CHAPTER 9 “A Free and Outspoken Press”: Coverage of Reconstruction Violence and Turmoil in Texas Newspapers, 1866–1868 by Mary Jo O’Rear1 I n early February of 1861 virtually every publisher in Texas printed the Declaration of Causes of Secession in his newspaper. Two items stood out within its last paragraph. One, that “the servitude of the African race is mutually beneficial to both bond and free,” became a clarion call for many as the Confederacy moved into war. The other, that “the destruction of the existing relations between the two races . . . [will] bring inevitable calamities upon both,” served as a warning for the future ; Southern loss meant cultural chaos.2 Secession’s failure made the first concept moot and the second real. With no value as property and little as citizens in the eyes of many, Texas freedmen became human targets . Their persecution between April 1865 and November 1868 would not only create unparalleled records of abuse but also underscore the overt bias of the state press. Periodicals had been influential in Texas beginning in 1813, but it was not until the founding of the Telegraph and Texas Register twentytwo years later that a sustained commercial newspaper system began in the state. Subject to the vicissitudes of poor roads, bad weather, incomplete supplies, and inadequate help, publishers printed news from every source available. If an issue of any kind were to be espoused, it would be the literate, opinionated, “often remarkable” pressmen of Texas who would do it.3 But by 1865, they were few. A majority of editors closed their offices due to war.4 Those newspapers that did survive roared into peace with a vengeance. Rarely objective in the best of times, most had supported secession and saw no reason to conceal their horror at its collapse . Despising the idea of federal Reconstruction in any form, even 268 Mary Jo O’Rear the mild program initiated by Abraham Lincoln and carried on by his successor, Andrew Johnson, they remained staunch supporters of the Democratic Party. Publisher David Richardson of the Texas Almanac characterized over 90 percent of the state’s sixty-one secular newspapers as Conservative, a label easily interchanged with unrepentant rebel.5 Such publications reflected the mood of most white citizenry in Texas, who generally supported Conservative Democrats in local and state political contests. The opposition called themselves “Unionists” or “Loyalists,” but most people termed them Radicals, a term laden with negative implications . They encompassed all those in favor of Reconstruction—Republicans , Unionists, carpetbaggers, scalawags, northern immigrants, and anyone else who supported federal authority.6 Radicals were everywhere in Texas, but their numbers paled in comparison with that of their rivals. The overwhelming majority of secular newspaper editors were conservative in their opinions. Chief among conservative editors was Willard Richardson, whose presses produced both The Texas Almanac and the Galveston Daily News. Before the war, Richardson was a strong advocate of slavery; afterwards , he continued to promote the advantages of bondage labor although admitting that “the South would not reestablish slavery . . . unless she could change or control the mind of the country on the subject.” He regretted emancipation and felt it would not be long before the freedmen “will look back on their former condition with a favor which will make them feel kindly toward their masters.”7 Although a long-standing Galveston citizen, Richardson began his career as a newspaper editor with the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register. Even after Richardson left the Houston-based newspaper, subsequent editors maintained the former editor’s conservative biases, especially in the post-Civil War years. In May 1867, the new editor, C. C. Gillespie, summed up his attitude toward Reconstruction, stating that “a more damnable notoriety of villainry never encompassed a people than that woven for the South by the leaders of the Radical Party.”8 No less rabid in his contempt for the North was John Walker of the Austin State Gazette. It was his partner, John Marshall, who hounded Sam Houston out of the governorship in 1857, and it was Marshall and Walker who first called on the state to secede in 1860. The war saw Marshall ’s death at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, but Walker continued publishing , taking particular aim in 1867 at “the violent tirades and bloody revolutionary schemes of the Radicals.”9 “A Free and Outspoken Press” 269 Less combative was the Harrison Flag’s William Barrett...