Suffrage restriction in post-reconstruction Texas: Urban politics and the specter of the commune

Journal of Southern History

Volumn 68, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 31-64

  Williams, Patrick G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649540787     PISSN: 00224642     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3069690     Document Type: Article

References (167)

1. See J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven and London, 1974), 68-72, 84
2. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 275, 325-49
3. V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949), 533-50
4. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 (New York and Oxford, 1997), 264
5. Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood, N.Y., 1979), 38-42
6. Malcolm Cook McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 1798-1901: A Study in Politics, the Negro, and Sectionalism (Chapel Hill, 1955), 269, 270, 289, 308-9
7. and William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 234-37
8. Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978), 305-28
9. Joseph H. Cartwright, The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s (Knoxville, 1976), 119-20, 159, 229, 243
10. Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville, 1985), 135-42
11. See also Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York and Oxford, 1992), 548 n. 3. Cartwright does acknowledge that urban disfranchisers' ambitions were not limited to reducing the black vote, but he says little about the white objects of such efforts
12. On Texas Republicans' trials and tribulations see Carl H. Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas (Austin and London, 1980)
13. On African American Texans see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790-1915 (Washington, D.C., 1918), 51
14. and Edward King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland (Hartford, Conn., 1875), 99
15. On demographic trends see Homer L. Kerr, "Migration into Texas, 1860-1880," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 70 (October 1966), 184-216
16. and Negro Population, 51
17. On attempts in the first Redeemer legislatures to provide for a poll tax qualification on voting, see GDN, April 26, 1874
18. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Texas: Being the Session of the Thirteenth Legislature Begun and Held at the City of Austin, January 14, 1873 (Austin, 1873), 71 (hereinafter cited as House Journal, 13 Legis.)
19. On the significance of local government in the post-Civil War South, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), 355-56
20. Randolph B. Campbell, "Grass Roots Reconstruction: The Personnel of County Government in Texas, 1865-1876," Journal of Southern History, 58 (February 1992), 99-100
21. and Michael R. Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers: Hill-Country Political Dissenters in the Lower South from Redemption to Populism (Baton Rouge and London, 1990), 54
22. William L. Richter, The Army in Texas During Reconstruction, 1865-1870 (College Station, Tex., 1987), 185
23. On Republican and African American officeholding in post-Reconstruction Texas, see Randolph B. Campbell, Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1880 (Baton Rouge and London, 1997), 54-57, 126-30
24. Lawrence D. Rice, The Negro in Texas, 1874-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1971), 93-95
25. and Leslie A. Lovett, "Biracial Politics and Community Development: The Reconstruction Experience in Fort Bend County, Texas, 1869-1889," Houston Review, 16, no. 1 (1994), 27-39
26. Alwyn Barr, Black Texans: A History of Negroes in Texas, 1528-1971 (Austin, 1973), 52-60, 88-98
27. Rice, Negro in Texas, 178
28. and Cecil Harper Jr., "Farming Someone Else's Land: Farm Tenancy in the Texas Brazos River Valley, 1850-1880" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas, 1988), 150-51, 160, 175
29. GDN, February 25, 1874, p. 2, c. 2 (first quotation)
30. Austin Daily Democratic Statesman, February 11, 1876, p. 2, c. 1 (second quotation)
31. The fact that even citizens in the whitest counties had faced a sharp rise in state and local taxes since the end of the Civil War gave the fiscal argument against Reconstruction particular strength. Taxes amounted to .31 percent of assessed property values in 1866; this figure had risen to 1.77 percent by 1871. Larry Earl Adams, "Economic Development in Texas During Reconstruction" (Ph.D. dissertation, North Texas State University, 1980), 43-48
32. Randolph B. Campbell, A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850-1880 (Austin, 1983), 333
33. Campbell, Grass-Roots Reconstruction, 49, 94-95, 160, 190, 218
34. Edmund Thornton Miller, A Financial History of Texas, Bulletin of the University of Texas No. 37 (Austin, 1916), 165-72
35. For the fiscal critique of the Reconstruction regime see Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas, 144-46, 161-62, 166-67
36. and Ernest William Winkler, ed., Platforms of Political Parties in Texas (Austin, 1916), 136-39
37. San Antonio Daily Herald, October 22, 1875, p. 2, c. 1 (third quotation)
38. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 202 (fifth quotation)
39. McKay, ed., Debates in the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1875, p. 188 (first quotation), 177 (second quotation)
40. J. T. Sanders, Farm Ownership and Tenancy in the Black Prairie of Texas, U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin No. 1068 (Washington, D.C., 1922), 1-5
41. Samuel Lee Evans, "Texas Agriculture, 1880-1930" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1960), 311, 318-19
42. GDN, January 8, 1876, p. 1, c. 2
43. GDN, October 8, 1875, p. 1, c. 3 (first quotation)
44. On interest in the North in suffrage restriction during this period, see Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York and Oxford, 1986), 45-52
45. John G. Sproat, "The Best Men": Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York, 1968), 253-56
46. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 119-27
47. Foner, Reconstruction, 492-93
48. and Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1997), 275, 277
49. For the common language employed to describe problems in northern and southern cities, see, for example, GDN, September 24, 1874, p. 1, c. 1
50. By the later 1880s a political machine had matured in San Antonio, but initially its developmental agenda appealed to the civic elite. See Dale Baum and Worth Robert Miller, "Ethnic Conflict and Machine Politics in San Antonio, 1892-1899," Journal of Urban History, 19 (August 1993), 63-84
51. John A. Booth and David R. Johnson, "Power and Progress in San Antonio Politics, 1836-1970," in David R. Johnson, John A. Booth, and Richard J. Harris, eds., The Politics of San Antonio: Community, Progress, and Power (Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1983), 8-15
52. On borderlands political machines see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, 1987), 39-40
53. Milo Kearney and Anthony Knopp, Boom and Bust: The Historical Cycles of Matamoros and Brownsville (Austin, 1991), 176-80
54. Evan Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas: The Progressive Era (Austin, 1982), 4-6
55. and Mario T. Garcia, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven and London, 1981), 156-57
56. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1997), 13, 24, 41, 51
57. For the later, unsuccessful attempt by a Republican and a Populist to disfranchise Latinos precisely because they were not white, see Arnoldo De León, In Re Ricardo Rodriguez: An Attempt at Chicano Disfranchisement in San Antonio, 1896-1897 (San Antonio, 1979)
58. Alwyn Barr, Reconstruction to Reform: Texas Politics, 1876-1906 (Austin and London, 1971), 203
59. Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas, 90-91
60. De León, In Re Ricardo Rodriguez, 2-5. It would be a mistake to imagine that Latinos inevitably voted (or were voted) in blocs, however
61. Kenneth L. Stewart and Arnoldo De León, Not Room Enough: Mexicans, Anglos, and Socioeconomic Change in Texas, 1850-1900 (Albuquerque, 1993), 39-60
62. House Journal, 13 Legis., 275, 1219
63. GDN, April 8, 1873, p. 1, c. 1 (second quotation)
64. See also David Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (Baton Rouge, 1982), 86
65. For urban population figures and rates of growth in Texas, see Char Miller and David R. Johnson, "The Rise of Urban Texas," in Char Miller and Heywood T. Sanders, eds., Urban Texas: Politics and Development (College Station, Tex., 1990), 6, 8
66. On Dallas's particularly rapid growth see Patricia Evridge Hill, Dallas: The Making of a Modern City (Austin, 1996), xxii-xxiii
67. and Campbell, Grass-Roots Reconstruction, 94
68. For the population of Houston and Galveston, see Miller and Johnson, "Rise of Urban Texas," 6
69. For the growth of manufacture between 1860 and 1870, see U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census, Manufactures of the United States in 1860 (Washington, 1865), 583-85, 592-93
70. For industrial growth more generally, see Vera Lea Dugas, "Texas Industry, 1860-1880," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 59 (October 1955), 151-83
71. Ninth Census, Statistics of Wealth and Industry, 815
72. U.S. Census Office, Tenth Census, Report on the Agencies of Transportation in the United States (Washington, 1883), 276-79
73. Compendium of the Tenth Census, Part II, 1383
74. U.S. Census Office, Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part II (Washington, 1897), 612
75. Austin Daily Democratic Statesman, July 29, 1875, p. 2, c. 1
76. See also GDN, March 2, 1875
77. Walter Prescott Webb and H. Bailey Carroll, eds., The Handbook of Texas (2 vols.; Austin, 1952), II, 92
78. Tarrant County, Citizens of, "Re: extension of time for completion of the Texas & Pacific Railroad," 1874, Memorials and Petitions, Records of the Legislature, Record Group 100, TSL
79. Laws Passed by the Eighth Congress of the Republic of Texas (Houston, 1844), 88, 94
80. Special Uiws of the Tenth Legislature of the State of Texas (Houston, 1864), 7 (quotations)
81. Special Laws of the State of Texas, Passed by the Eleventh Legislature (Austin, 1866), 167, 312
82. Special Laws of the Twelfth Legislature of the State of Texas. Called Session (Austin, 1870), 68, 245, 248
83. See also Harold L. Platt, "The Stillbirth of Urban Politics in the Reconstruction South: Houston, Texas as a Test Case," Houston Review, 4 (Summer 1982), 60
84. and Kenneth W. Wheeler, To Wear a City's Crown: The Beginnings of Urban Growth in Texas, 1836-1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 74
85. Kingston, Attlesey, and Crawford, Texas Almanac's Political History of Texas, 61
86. James V. Reese, "The Early History of Labor Organization in Texas, 1838-1876," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 72 (July 1968), 1-20, esp. 16-19
87. [Houston?] Telegram quoted in Navasota Weekly Tablet, November 9, 1877, p. 2, c. 4 (quotation)
88. Richter, Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 83
89. and Carl H. Moneyhon, "Public Education and Texas Reconstruction Politics, 1871-1874," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 92 (January 1989), 393-416
90. See, for example, GDN, February 23, 26, 1875, February 20, 1876
91. John H. Heller, ed., Heller's Galveston City Directory 1876-7 (Galveston, [1876])
92. Journal of the Senate of the State of Texas: Being the Session of the Fourteenth Legislature Begun and Held at the City of Austin, January 13, 1874 (Austin, 1874), 347, 374, 439, 514
93. John Anthony Moretta, William Pitt Ballinger: Texas Lawyer, Southern Statesman, 1825-1888 (Austin, 2000), 216
94. Mauer, "Poll Tax," 132-33
95. Patrick G. Williams, "Redeemer Democrats and the Roots of Modern Texas, 1872-1884" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1996), 163-76
96. Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Texas Begun and Held at the City of Austin, September 6, 1875 (Galveston, 1875), 308-9
97. General Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Session of the Fifteenth Legislature Begun and Held at the City of Austin, April 18th, 1876 (Galveston, 1876), 199-201
98. General Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Seventeenth Legislature, Convened at the City of Austin, January 11, 1881, and Adjourned April 1, 1881 (Galveston, 1881), 63-64
99. Journal of the Constitutional Convention, 237-38
100. Constitution of the State of Texas [1876], Art. VI, sec. 1
101. Braden et al., Constitution of the State of Texas, II, 483-85
102. For the efforts of liberal reformers in 1877-78 to have property qualifications on the urban franchise incorporated into the New York state constitution, see McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics, 48-50
103. Platt, City Building in the New South, 19-64
104. Rodriquez, "Urban Populism," 36-37
105. On Fulton and Cuney in Galveston see Virginia Neal Hinze, "Noms Wright Cuney" (M.A. thesis, Rice University, 1965), 35-53
106. Barr, Reconstruction to Reform, 44, 48-49, 56
107. George Thomas Kellam, "A Shadow of Itself: The Rise and Decline of Cooperative Radicalism in Texas, 1875-18[9]6" (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, 1987), 119-22, 173-75, 183-85, 193-95, 216
108. Winkler, Platforms of Political Parties in Texas, 246-47, 256-57, 260
109. Roscoe C. Martin, The People's Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics (Austin, 1933), 32
110. David R. Johnson, "Frugal and Sparing: Interest Groups, Politics, and City Building in San Antonio, 1870-85," in Miller and Sanders, eds., Urban Texas, 33-57
111. William S. Speer and John Henry Brown, eds., Encyclopedia of the New West (Marshall, Tex., 1881), 78-80
112. Worth Robert Miller, "Harrison County Methods: Election Fraud in Late Nineteenth-Century Texas," Locus, 7 (Spring 1995), 111-28
113. Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 337-64
114. Lovett, "Biracial Politics and Community Development," 38
115. Lawrence C. Goodwyn, "Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study," American Historical Review, 76 (December 1971), 1435-56. Terrell quotation cited at n. 12
116. In 1879 the legislature did pass a statewide requirement to print ballots on plain white paper with no identifying mark by which illiterates might distinguish among party tickets. The bill had been introduced in the Texas House by a Democrat from black-majority Montgomery County who also happened to represent urban Harris County. Navasota Weekly Tablet, January 31, 1879
117. Rebecca L. Borjas, "John Evans McComb," in Ron Tyler et al., eds., The New Handbook of Texas (6 vols.; Austin, 1996), IV, 377
118. General Laws of the State of Texas, Passed at the Regular Session of the Sixteenth Legislature, Convened at the City of Austin, January 14th, 1879, and Adjourned April 24th, 1879 (Galveston, 1879), 120
119. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 201-4
120. Barr, Reconstruction to Reform, 196
121. Rice, Negro in Texas, 116, 132
122. Rodriquez, "Urban Populism," 91 (quotation)
123. Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Session of the Fifteenth Legislature Begun and Held at the City of Austin, April 18th, 1876 (Galveston, 1876), 76
124. Special Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Twenty-First Legislature Convened at the City of Austin, January 8, 1889, and Adjourned April 6, 1889 (Austin, 1889), 98
125. U.S. Census Office, Report on Farms and Homes: Proprietorship and Indebtedness in the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, 1896), 30, 366-70
126. General Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Twentieth Legislature Convened at the City of Austin, January 11, 1887, and Adjourned April 4, 1887 (Austin, 1887), 157
127. McKay, ed., Debates in the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1875, pp. 191-93 (quotation on p. 193)
128. Rodriquez, "Urban Populism," 74-75, 78-79
129. General Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the First Called Session of the Twenty-Second Legislature Convened at the City of Austin, March 14, 1892, and Adjourned April 12, 1892 (Austin, 1892), 13-19
130. Report on the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part One, 328-41, 482
131. U.S. Census Office, Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1 - Population (Washington, 1892), 848-49
132. John William Graves, "Negro Disfranchisement in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 26 (Autumn 1967), 211-14
133. Braden et al., Constitution of Texas, II, 490-92
134. Robert W. Doty, "The Texas Voter Registration Law and the Due Process Clause," Houston Law Review, 7 (November 1969), 163-215
135. See, for example, Miller, "Harrison County Methods," 111-28
136. Baum and Miller, "Ethnic Conflict and Machine Politics in San Antonio," 66
137. Rodriquez, "Urban Populism," 226, 233, 255-57, 307, 310
138. See Williams, "Redeemer Democrats and the Roots of Modern Texas," 118-37
139. Bradley Robert Rice, Progressive Cities: The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901-1920 (Austin and London, 1977), 4-6, 77 (quotation)
140. Turner, Women, Culture, and Community, 11-12, 195-96
141. General Laws of the State of Texas Passed at the Regular Session of the Twenty-Fourth Legislature Convened at the City of Austin, January 8, 1895, and Adjourned April 30, 1895 (Austin, 1895), 8-9
142. For the similar impact of at-large systems in other southern cities, see Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 268-69, 323
143. Rice, Progressive Cities, 3-33, 86
144. James Weinstein, "Organized Business and the City Commission and Manager Movements," Journal of Southern History, 28 (May 1962), 166-82
145. H. J. Haskell, "The Texas Idea: City Government by a Board of Directors," Outlook, 85 (April 13, 1907), 839-43
146. Richard G. Miller, "Fort Worth and the Progressive Era: The Movement for Charter Revision, 1899-1907," in Margaret Francine Morris and Elliott West, eds., Essays on Urban America (Austin and London, 1975), 89-121
147. Hill, Dallas, 8-9
148. The volte-face by Texas Democrats with respect to a state poll tax requires further close study, but see Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 271-81
149. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 71, 196-209
150. Gregg Cantrell and D. Scott Barton, "Texas Populists and the Failure of Biracial Politics," Journal of Southern History, 55 (November 1989), 690-92
151. Worth Robert Miller, "Building a Progressive Coalition in Texas: The Populist-Reform Democrat Rapprochement, 1900-1907," Journal of Southern History, 52 (May 1986), 172-75
152. Anders, Saw Rule in South Texas, 90-94
153. U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census, Population, Part II (Washington, 1902), 172
154. Miller, "Fort Worth and the Progressive Era," 100 (quotation)
155. See Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871-1921 (Knoxville, 1977), 58-59
156. Hine, Black Victory, 25-53
157. On class divisions in municipal politics see Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880-1896 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 35-39, 44-47
158. James Michael Russell, Atlanta, 1847-1890: City Building in the Old South and the New (Baton Rouge and London, 1988), 170-71, 182-87, 206-15
159. Eugene J. Watts, The Social Bases of City Politics: Atlanta, 1865-1903 (Westport, Conn., and London, 1978), 14, 20-30, 48-51
160. Wrenn, Crisis and Commission Government, 25
161. On disfranchisement as a response to such divisions see Matthew J. Schott, "Progressives Against Democracy: Electoral Reform in Louisiana, 1894-1921," Louisiana History, 20 (Summer 1979), 247-60
162. The work of Eugene Watts and James Russell on Atlanta suggests another way in which class divisions among whites accelerated disfranchisement. Black voters' tendency to side with elite reformers inspired the white working class to press for a white primary. Watts, Social Bases of City Politics, 30
163. Russell, Atlanta, 207-15
164. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion. Vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York and Oxford, 1990), 391 (Upshur quotation)
165. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995), 228-35
166. Eric L. McKitrick, ed., Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), 123-24 (Hammond quotation)
167. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton, 1960), 288-90