Michener, James A. (116 page)

The cousins were at first charmed by this affable man with the very attractive wife. The general was now thirty-eight years old, fleshy, clean-shaven, and often prophetic when peering into the future: 'Worst mistake Texas ever made, gentlemen, was when we sent Sam Houston to the United States Senate. Hell, he don't represent the interests of true Texans or the future of the South.'

'Wait a minute,' Somerset interrupted. 'I've seen pamphlets in which you and Houston fought side by side in getting Texas into the Union.'

'We did, that we did. Even a habitual drunk can sober up sometimes and do the right thing. But he's a man who cannot be trusted, never could be.'

Reuben said: 'They tell me you had a chance to shoot him in that duel, and that as a gentleman, you shot off to the side.'

"\\ orst mistake I ever made. Sooner or later, somebody's goin' to have to handle that old drunk.'

When Quimper left Lakeview, the Cobb cousins remained confused because so much of what he said was true, so much of what he did was false, and it was during these days of review that Reuben and Sett began to draw apart in their judgment of the man. Reuben, always thirsting for action, was eager to associate himself with Quimper and was uneasy lest the tall-talker initiate some campaign without including him, but Sett, a cautious judge of men, grew more suspicious of Quimper the more he thought about the man's behavior. In this he was abetted by Millicent, who said simply, when they were alone: 'He's a fraud. Couldn't you see that?'

'I did see it, but I also saw that he makes great sense when he talks about South and North.'

'Easy. Listen to him when he talks, but leave him when he begins to act.'

In 1854, Yancey Quimper rode back to Jefferson with a band of nineteen Southern patriots who were determined to move Kansas into the slave column, and he was not only prepared to march them right into that area but also to help them in disciplining any Northerners who might have slipped across the border. He was so excited, so persuasive, that Reuben Cobb rode north with him.

They entered Kansas quietly, in three separate groups, and spent two weeks listening to accounts of Northern perfidy. For fifteen days they did nothing except scout the land and establish escape routes in case a superior Northern force attacked. Of course, at this time there was no Northern force, superior or inferior, but they did come upon a pair of isolated farms occupied by families from Illinois, and these they surrounded and attacked on their last night in the area.

'No killin'!' Quimper ordered as his men crept closer, and his command was obeyed, for the Texans ran at the houses shouting and yelling, and so swift were they in executing Quimper's commands, they had possession of the farms before the occupants could think of gunfire. The families were herded onto a hillside, where they watched as torches were applied to the rude homes they had built with painful effort.

'You go back where you belong,' Quimper warned them. 'Your kind is not welcome here.'

When the vigilantes returned across the Red River, recognized

by Congress as the northern boundary of Texas, they learned that Reverend Hutchinson, the Methodist minister who had been punished before because of his incendiary work among slaves, was still up to his old tricks, so Quimper, Cobb and three others rode out to his parsonage and hanged him.

The group then separated, Cobb heading east to Jefferson and Quimper south to Xavier, but each carried a promise from the other: 'When the trouble starts, you can rely on me.'

When Elmer Carmody published his travel book, Texas Good and Bad, he could not have foreseen that his carefully considered judgment on two types of Texas community, English and German, would place the residents of the latter in mortal danger. First, his generalizations about the typical Texas town of that period:

South of the Brazos, I stopped overnight at the hostelry of one Mr. Angeny, from parts unknown. He had four guests that night, but explained to us: 'I ain't got no food in the place, saven some cornbread and lard and sugar.' That's what we ate. He had no blankets, either, and his two beds in which four of us would sleep with all our clothes on for warmth were lice-ridden. He also had no hot water for shaving, no chamberpot for convenience, and very little hay for our horses. Charge, $1.50 for man, $.85 for beast.

In this frame of mind Carmody chanced to move west from Austin, which he considered a pitiful excuse for a state capital, 'worst in America, all spittoons and greasy beef,' and in his casual wandering he came upon Fredericksburg, which he extolled:

It was with these gloomy reflections that I turned a bend in the Peder-nales River and came upon the two beautiful stone houses of the Allerkamp family, and immediately I saw them, I realized that I was passing from barbarism into civilization.

The trees were trimmed, as trees should be when they stand about homes. The lawn was green, and flowers were confined to neat beds upon which someone had spent considerable care. The well-designed houses were of stone, with no open spaces for the wind to enter, which I had been accustomed to on my Texas travels. And over everything there was a cloak of neatness, of respectability, of the very best husbandry.

As a practiced writer, Carmody realized that for an outsider to venture into a sensitive area like Texas and offer comment on its way of life was hazardous and bound to excite criticism, but even

he did not appreciate how inflammatory it was to compare the Germans so favorably to the barbarians he encountered elsewhere. Especially dangerous were his comments about white cotton growers:

I had been assured since entering Texas that the cultivation of cotton could be achieved only with the work of slaves and that no white man could possibly plant and harvest this demanding plant. 1 saw that the Germans of the hill country did very well with cotton. They grow it efficiently, bale it more carefully than others, then watch it bring a marked premium at Galveston, New Orleans and Liverpool. Fredericksburg proves that most of what Texans say about slavery is nonsense.

A writer has certain advantages. He can publish such evaluations, then scurry out of the country, but his words remain behind, generating bitterness, and in the years following the circulation of Carmody's Texas Good and Bad, other Texas citizens began to look upon the Germans as aliens who refused to enter the mainstream of Texas life, as cryptic abolitionists, and even as traitors to the fundamental patriotism of the state.

When General Quimper visited the Cobbs, he found them incensed at what Carmody had written about them, but they had not finished voicing their grievances when he interrupted: 'Gentlemen, it isn't only his infringement of your courtesy that should bother you. What can you expect of a writer? It's his praising of the Germans. And particularly what he says about slavery.'

He took the Carmody book and read with emphasis the passage about growing cotton without slaves: That's treasonous! The time could come when we might have to teach those Germans a lesson in manners. They invade our land and then try to tell us how to behave. If we catch them tamperin' with our slaves . . .'

He had touched upon one of the strangest aspects of Southern life: many slaveholders were convinced that their slaves, at least, were supremely happy in their position of servitude; but at the same time, the owners were desperately afraid of slave uprisings, or of Northerners inciting their slaves; there was a constant tattoo of hangings, beatings and terrible repressions whenever it was suspected that the 'happy' slaves might be surreptitiously preparing a general slaughter. Thus there had been fierce punishments meted out when it looked as if the slaves might rebel at Nacogdoches, and white clergymen had been hanged at the Red River on the mere suspicion that they had been 'tamperin' with our loyal slaves.'

Any serious consideration of punishing the insidious Germans

was forgotten in early June of 1856, when word reached Texas of the insane behavior of John Brown and his sons in Kansas.

'They've murdered Southerners!' General Quimper cried as he carried the news from house to house, and before the details could be verified, Quimper and Reuben Cobb were back on the trail to Bleeding Kansas. With the nineteen men who accompanied them, they formed a powerful support for the Southern agents who were trying to ensure that if a plebiscite ever occurred, the vote would favor slavery. Of these twenty-one vigorous defenders of the Southern position, only four owned slaves—Quimper was not one of them—and only thirteen had come into Texas from Southern states, but all were willing to risk their lives in defense of the South. As Quimper himself explained, after a wild skirmish in which four abolitionists were slain: 'You have a strong feelin' that God intended things to be the way they are in the South. And any man can see that the welfare of Texas depends on our standin' shoulder to shoulder with our Southern brothers.'

When Cobb and Quimper reached home with the exciting news of their victories in Kansas—'Nine abolitionists killed without the loss of a Texan'—they started to try to whip up enthusiasm for some kind of vague action against the Union, but now they ran into the iron-hard character of Sam Houston, who was determined to protect the Union and keep his beloved Texas firmly within its protection.

Quimper, an able man where political savagery was required, led the fight to humiliate the 'old drunk,' as he still called him: 'He sits there in the Senate of the United States and does everything possible to humiliate Texas. Always he votes against our interests. He might as well be an abolitionist.'

His charges were partially true, because in these closing days of his life Sam Houston, now sixty-four, dropped the vacillation which had sometimes clouded his character and came out strongly and heroically in favor of preserving the Union, regardless of the offense to local preferences: '1 support the Union which has made us great, and if there are any temporary imbalances, they can be corrected.' When pressed, he admitted that he was now and had always been a strong pro-slavery man, but that slavery could be protected and even advanced within the existing structure, and he begged his fellow Texans to protect it in that constitutional manner.

In a time of threatening chaos, he was a constant voice of reason, and when others talked with increasing passion he became more conciliatory, imploring his friends, North and South, to retain the rule of common sense. When he had felt that to pre-

serve the Union he must vote for the Compromise of 1850, because he saw it as the only way to prevent dissolution, he had been denounced as a traitor to the Southern cause, and when he spoke even more forcefully against the shameful surrender of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, he was vilified.

It was as a consequence of this general disfavor into which Houston had fallen that General Quimper devised a clever manipulation to show Houston and the rest of the state just how deeply Texas now despised its former hero. 'Let's show the old fool we mean business,' Quimper argued. 'Let's elect his replacement in the Senate right now.'

'His term has two more years to run. Such a rebuke has never before been given.'

'We'll do it, and he'll be the laughingstock of the nation.' And forthwith Quimper bullied his fellow Texas state senators into designating Houston's replacement while he was still in office.

But Houston was a fighter, and in 1859 he astounded Quimper and his cronies by announcing that since he was being denied his Senate seat, he would run for the governorship of Texas on a platform of preserving the Union. Aware that sentiment was veering against him on this point, he mounted an intensely personal campaign, crisscrossing the state and applying his unusual powers of persuasion. People swarmed to meet with him, listened, rejected his program but supported him personally. Some felt that the old Indian-lover could solve the Indian problems that agitated the western counties, and when the votes were counted, this man who swam against the tide had won, capping a career unmatched in American history: congressman from Tennessee, twice elected governor of that state, twice president of the Republic of Texas, United States senator, and now governor of the state of Texas. He had known more ups and downs than any other major figure in American politics, for after almost every victory, there had come defeat. Now, with the Union in peril, he would launch a heroic defense of his principles.

It was not going to be easy. General Quimper, encouraged by Houston's foes, dusted off his old anti-Houston pamphlet of 1841, the one written by another hand, and added a salvo of subsequent charges:

We have known for many years that Houston is a drunk, a bigamist, a liar, a land-office crook, a despoiler of ladies and a coward who avoided battle and an honest duel whenever possible But did we then know that he was also an enemy of the South, a betrayer of the interests of Texas, a cheap tool in the hands of abolitionists and a stealer of public moneys?

That is the real Sam Houston, and he is powerless to deny even one of these charges, because the entire nation, and Texas in particular, knows they are true

As the crucial presidential election of 1860 approached, Quimper maintained the drumbeat of charges against Houston, and the agony into which the nation was stumbling encouraged people to believe the accusations, so that within months of his surprising victory at the polls, the reputation of Sam Houston had fallen to new depths. He may have sensed that he was heading for the major role in a Greek tragedy of destroyed ambitions, but if he did, he still plunged ahead, his actions showing his belief that the preservation of the Union was more valuable to the world than the salvaging of a local reputation.

From the vantage point of Texas, the presidential election of 1860 can be quickly summarized but not so easily understood. The new Republican party nominated a former congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, whose very name was anathema to the South; when planters like the Cobbs were forced to speak it, they either spat or cursed.

The Democrats, split over the question of slavery-, produced splinter groups that nominated three candidates whose combined popular vote smothered Lincoln, 2,810,501 to a mere 1,866,352. However, the peculiarity of the electoral system gave the Illinois lawyer the victory', 180 to 123, enabling him to become President of a nation already painfully divided on a vital issue, all of his electoral votes coming from the Northern states. In Texas he collected not a single vote, popular or electoral; he was not allowed on the ballot. But the most shocking fact was that in the Southern states, which he must now try to govern, he received less than 100,000 votes in all. Tragedy became inescapable, and men of all parties sensed it.