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Not Even Past

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than I care to admit: I met his words first, before I met him. I was dazzled by Felipe’s Columbus: the flow, the style of his writing, the power of his argument. And then I came across Millennium. I had just finished graduate school and I was earning my bread and butter teaching large survey classes of Latin American History, and even larger ones of World History. I was to offer kids sweeping panoramas: from the age of the dinosaurs to current events, namely, the Cold War. Global history was yet to produce a multimillion dollar textbook industry. So Millennium came to me as a breadth of fresh air: irreverent, fast paced, learned, entertaining, full of strange and fascinating vignettes, from Ming China to Peronist Argentina. I was then writing my How to Write the History of the New World. I had a fellowship to the John Carter Brown Library.

One of the first things I learned at the JCB was that Felipe occupied the office right next to ours. We had 8 cubicles. His was for him, alone. He kept sherry in his office. His accent and demeanor made him seem unapproachable. I don’t remember the official title he was given, some kind of JCB lordship: The Lord of the Rings, I think. During the fellows’ luncheons he would tear into the other fellows’ arguments with probing, disarming questions, prefaced always by a learned and most insightful comment on any and every field of expertise. When asked about his own research, he would reply “civilizations.” It turns out, that year, he was writing that book. The whole thing was frightening to me at the time.

The John Carter Brown Library's MacMillian Reading Room: a large, richly decorated hall with a high ceiling. Low bookshelves and large pieces of art line the walls.; desks with work stations stand in the middle of the room. A few researchers are visible at the desks.
The John Carter Brown Library’s MacMillan Reading Room, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

And then one day, I noticed Felipe spoke Spanish. I approached him for the first time in Spanish and a friendship emerged. He came for dinner and met my kids, Sebastian and Andrea, both then toddlers. Later Felipe would read my manuscript and help me improve it before it became a book; he wrote a blurb when it was published; promoted it in England and beyond; got it noticed in The Economist; passed judgment on my tenure; followed me around with letters of support in my peripatetic existence. Felipe and his awesome power changed my career and buoyed up my self-esteem. I owe him big.

Felipe and I share something beyond friendship and a common language: our view of the past. The book before us, Our America, epitomizes that shared view. It is about turning perspectives upside down. It is about reading self-satisfying narratives of the past irreverently, mockingly, unsparingly. It is about elucidating the political work that History, with capital H, does. History creates myths that move and inspire, but it also creates myths that silence. Our America is a book about myths: the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the pursuit of King Arthur, the realm of Queen Calafia, the curse of Zorro, the revenge of Moroni, the republic of Hesperus. Our America narrates the history of the United States from a perspective I have often tried to use myself: from the South, rather than the East.

The book is divided into three periods: 1) when Hispanics loomed large over the colonial territories that are now the United States; 2) when Hispanics lost power in the 19th century as the Anglo imperial frontier expanded into the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, and when Hispanics came to be seen as racially inferior, misbehaving children to spank and educate; and 3) when Hispanics in the 20th century slowly crawled their way back from marginalization to claim forcefully a central role in the polity, demographically, politically, and culturally.

The first period uses the myths of the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the knights of King Arthur, and the realm of queen Calafia to demonstrate how the Hispanic dimensions of US colonial history shaped its every detail, from Roanoke, to Jamestown, to Plymouth, to Massachusetts Bay, to Charleston, to the Ohio River Valley, to the siege of Yorktown. From the Puritan plantations to the American Revolution. Hispanics shaped every colonial event described in college textbooks.

The second period makes for tearful, tragic reading:  losses, lynching, brutality, and racial slurs aimed at Hispanics, Indians, Blacks, all lumped together. Felipe follows El Zorro and the Mormon prophet Moroni to describe the losses of California, Texas, the Rockies, the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, where Hispanics, Blacks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache, and Pacific Islanders had created shared worlds together for generations. Those shared worlds were found in the prairies, on the Mississippi (from the Ohio all the way to Louisiana), and on the Pacific coast (from Monterrey and Baja to Manila). These worlds surrendered to industrialization, machine guns, railroads, steamboats, industrial tractors, and millions of land hungry illegal immigrants from England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Central Europe, who came to the land to act as, say, Texas Rangers and carry out genocide.

The third period is not less tragic; it narrates the age of braceros and forced deportation, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Felipe reminds us that liberal Obama, who won his first and second presidency on the back of the Hispanic vote, has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants, four times as many as George W Bush, who only managed to deport 400,000. But this age of violence and racism, and merciless labor exploitation, has also experienced the Return of Aztlan: a huge demographic explosion, the Chicano movement, Cesar Chavez, and Civil Rights. And it also seems to be on its way to turning the Anglo republic into a republic of Hesperus, the king of the Hesperides, whose islands the chronicler Fernandez Oviedo claimed where in fact Hispanic colonies.

Seven men in work clothes pose for a photograph in a beet field near Stockton, California in this black-and-white photograph.
Marjory Collins, photographer. Stockton (vicinity), California. Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets. 1943. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is little with which to take issue in this book. I share Felipe’s perspective and passion. I wish I could claim I also share his panache, wit, and style. The book is filled with insight, one-liners, and striking reversals of traditional narratives. Let me share with you a few:

  1. Describing how millions of acres were stolen from rancheros in Texas, Nuevo Mexico and California in the 19th century to create large Anglo latifundias, Felipe points out: “The notion that US rule always broke latifundias and introduced morally superior smallholders is risible.”
  2. His account of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta who acted as social bandits in Texas and California explores also the emergence of the literary character of El Zorro as the first superhero to emerge in the US. Felipe then adds: “It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”
  3. His description of what the arrival of Anglo capital and law into New Mexico meant, is guided by the reading of the autobiography of Agnes Morely Cleaveland. After a description of her romantic narrative of frontier violence and odd Anglo characters, Felipe bitingly concludes: “Agnes Cleaveland was the chronicler of the Americanization of New Mexico, and her evidence, because it is neutral, is decisive in demonstrating that the United States was not a “civilizing influence.” On the contrary it brought more lowlifes, scapegraces, and refugees from civilization to the colony than ever before.”

I could multiply the examples, but you get the point.

I would not do my job if I were not to deliver some critical comments on Felipe’s book. So to conclude, let me offer a few.

I enjoyed the first section more than I did the second, and the second more than I did the third. The third section on the revitalization of Aztlan and the return of Hispanics into the mainstream of America follow the Chicano narrative too closely to offer fresh insights. How to present Hispanics as something more than undocumented or exploited laborers? How to populate the more recent history of the Hispanic diaspora with Nobel Prize winners, scientists, philosophers, economists, opera singers, and captains of industry to offset the dominant image of popular culture, one of curvaceous Shakira and awesome yet corrupt baseball players? And there is the history of the reverse: the “USification” of Latin America, namely, the transformation of a region by capital, values, and returnees from the United States. In the South there lies the Anglo just as deeply within as lies the Hispanic within the North. We can no longer sever the Hispanic from the Anglo, neither here nor there.

The second section on tragic outcomes, therefore, could have been balanced by a more continental approach of mutual influences, cutting both ways. It could have yielded a narrative of Hispanic influence and continental creativity beyond the bandit and the pistolero. I have in mind the printing presses of Philadelphia that in the first half of the nineteenth century became an endless source of books and ideas, shaping Latin America’s public sphere, just as much as did the books printed in London or in Paris in Spanish in the nineteenth century. There is also the case of the origins of American international law and the law of nations that Greg Grandin has so insightfully described in a recent article in the American Historical Review. Grandin shows that jurisprudence and identities, both in the North and South, were the product of codependences and mutual influences. In short, the Hispanic 19th century in the US is much more than dispossession and violence (for other examples of what is possible, see also Gregory Downs’ provocative essay on the Mexicanization of 19th-century American Politics).

The first section is for me the most satisfying and the one about which I know most. It manages to do what was a call to arms for me in 2006, namely, to Iberianize the early modern Atlantic. There are a few Puritan Conquistadors walking through Felipe’s pages. I therefore felt confirmed, justified, in short, delighted. But even here more could be done. I have encountered, for example, English Calvinist debates on colonization, in the 1610s in 1629 that were thoroughly shaped by Iberian categories of dominium and sovereignty. The odd figure of Roger Williams with his radical ideas about religion and state can better be interpreted if we put him in dialogue with Las Casas. Williams knew well the ideas about the radical separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignty so forcefully presented by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria to undermine any Spanish claims of rightful possession of property and authority in the Americas. Williams got to his ideas about state and religion by first offering a critique of Calvinist and Stuart notions of dominium and sovereignty in America. This facet of Williams completely escaped Edmund Morgan’s pioneering study published 50 years ago. In 2012 it continues to escape John Barry, whose Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul remains as parochial as Morgan’s. Both Barry and Morgan should have known better had they not be so provincially Anglo: to study Williams is to study Las Casas and Vitoria. To paraphrase Berry and to capture Felipe’s spirit, to study the creation of the American soul is in fact to study the creation of the Hispano-American soul.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

A (Queer) Rebel Wife In Texas

In 2001, many of Lizzie Scott Neblett’s diaries and letters were published in a volume entitled A Rebel Wife In Texas. The text provides a harrowing glimpse into the desperation, brutality, and minutiae of everyday life in antebellum Texas from the perspective of a landed, slaveholding, Southern wife. Letters written to Neblett prior to her May 25, 1852 wedding to aspiring attorney William H. Neblett, however, lend an entirely different type of insight into the “rebel wife’s” intimate affairs, one that unearths a wealth of decidedly queer complexity.

Book cover of A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864 edited by Erika L. Murr
A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864 edited by Erika L. Murr

The bulk of these missives were penned by sisters Sallie and Amanda Noble, childhood friends of Neblett residing at the time in Houston. Much of the correspondence between the Noblewomen and Neblett gestures toward an increasingly sapphic sociality. On September 12, 1851, for instance, Sallie writes to Neblett to divulge that she “was feeling in a funny mood [that] morning [and] could think of no better business than to trouble [Lizzie] with a few of my funny thoughts . . . . I told Amanda a few minutes ago that . . . I was going to do just as I pleased [and] I did not care what people said [or] thought…Did you ever have such feelings Lizzie?” Noble does not elaborate on just what kinds of things she intended to “do . . . as [she] pleased,” but later in this same letter, Sallie assures Neblett that despite persistent rumors that she is soon to be wed, “I have not the most distant idea of getting married soon.”

Ten days later, Sallie’s sister Amanda sends Neblett a note inquiring “what [had] become of [the] Angel of a beauty you [Lizzie] described to us some time since. Is she up there [in Anderson] still?” before adding, “I am happy to know that you have some one or two up there with whom you can be intimate, girls I mean.”

Civil War envelope showing bald eagle with American flag and Confederate stars and bars flag and sailing ships in the distance ca.1861-865 via Library of Congress
Civil War envelope showing bald eagle with American flag and Confederate stars and bars flag and sailing ships in the distance ca.1861-865 via Library of Congress

While both messages suggest something of a queer kinship between long-time companions, with the Nobles detailing their own disinterest in the prospect of marriage and asking after Lizzie’s Anderson dalliances, Amanda’s letters, in particular, indicate that she and Neblett’s relationship may have constituted what we might now term a romantic friendship. This is evident beginning with Noble’s July 14 admission that “many many have been the times that I’ve wished myself in Anderson with you [Lizzie]—how we would ramble and frolic through the woods—leave our clothes off of us, and many other amusing things, which would be a sunny spot in our lives.”

The tone of Noble’s dispatches becomes more clandestine near the close of 1851. On November 8, Amanda wrote to report that, “when Pa gave me your letter, I was all anxiety to know the contents, so much so, that I could scarcely contain myself. Having hid myself where none could disturb or molest, I sat me down, and there silently and alone communed with my Lizzie.” This desire for seclusion is reflected in Noble’s decision to sign this letter simply “A.,” though similarities in handwriting and content between this and previous writings confirm Amanda as its author. The rest of the missive seems to reveal that the two women have had some kind of falling out. Noble writes “As I perused line after line [of Lizzie’s last communication], thoughts of the past came washing with violence, and in a few moments tears came trickling down my cheeks…It pains me when I think that I ever offended one that I love so much as you Lizzie.” Amanda admonishes her friend to “dwell on the pleasures of happiness we’ve had together” rather than her bouts of temper, and adds that “the past, though [infused] with the bitter, has also its share of the sweet.”

Image of part of the "Dear Lizzie" letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851)
“Dear Lizzie” letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851)

Revisiting her earlier fantasy, Noble tells Neblett that “it appears to me if I were with you that something would quicken my languid imagination. We would ramble over the woods, build fires, and roast potatoes again, and perform many wondrous exploits. Lizzie, I so sincerely wish I were with you, but how I shall get there, I know not . . . I will not ‘give it up so’—perhaps fate will yet smile on [us].”

It is unclear, though, whether that was to be the case. Shortly after the writing of this letter, Lizzie was wed and embarked on a new, ultimately trying chapter of her life—marked by war, motherhood, violence, and loss. And, despite earlier protestations to the contrary, the years following Lizzie’s marriage found both Sally and Amanda Noble following suit, with the former marrying a John Kennard in 1855 and the latter marrying Henry White in 1856. Years later, however, Neblett still seemed to maintain a nostalgic fondness for the confidantes of her maiden days, journaling of a sick and seemingly dying Amanda in 1863, “she is not long for this world—[but] she ought to live, for she has always managed to extract much sweetness from life.”

Gallery of Neblett and Noble’s Letters via the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Bibliography

  • A. to Lizzie Scott, November 8, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • Benowitz, June Melby. “Neblett, Elizabeth Scott.” Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed February 11, 2020: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fne28.
  • Neblett, Elizabeth Scott, and Erika L. Murr. A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
  • Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, July 14, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, September 22, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • Noble, Sallie to Lizzie Scott, September 12, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.


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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery

On the eve of the Civil War, an advertisement appeared in the Texas Almanac announcing the sale of five enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel.

“Negroes For Sale––I will offer for sale, in the city of Austin, before the Stringer’s Hotel, on the 1st day of January next, to the highest bidder, in Confederate or State Treasury Notes, the following lot of likely Negroes, to wit. Three Negro Girls and two Boys, ages ranging from 15 to 16 years. The title to said Negroes is indisputable” —The Texas Almanac, Austin December 27th, 1862

Image of the cover of The Texas Almanac for 1862
via Portal for Texas History

This hotel was one of the many businesses in Austin using enslaved labor, a commonplace practice that extended to every part of Texas. However, urban slavery in Austin differed substantially from slavery on the vast plantations that stretched across Texas’ rural geography. Unlike rural planters, urban slaveholders were largely merchants, businessmen, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals. The urban status of these slaveholders in Austin meant that enslaved people performed a wide variety of tasks, making them highly mobile and multi-occupational. Austin property holders, proprietors, and city planners built enslaved labor not only into the city’s economy, but into its very physical space to meet local needs. This examination of the Stringer’s Hotel provides a brief window for looking into Austin’s history of slavery and perhaps the history of enslaved people in the urban context.

Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the map's title and the eastern part of Austin
Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)
Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the blocks around the Avenue Hotel
Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)

On September 3, 1850, Swante Magnus Swenson purchased a city lot in Austin. In 1854, he built the Swenson Building on Congress Avenue where the current Piedmont Hotel stands today. Inside the building, on the first floor, were a drug store, a general goods store, a hardware store, and a grocery store; a hotel, (named the Avenue Hotel but locally known as the Stringer’s Hotel) was located on the upper two levels of the building.  The Travis County Deeds Records show that sometime later, Swenson leased the hotel to a John Stringer, giving the hotel its name “the Stringer’s Hotel.” An 1885 Austin city Sanborn map of the Swenson Building shows that Swenson had a room built for “servants” in the hotel portion of the building. There is no documentation detailing whether enslaved people stayed in that room since the Sanborn map is dated twenty years after the Civil War. However, an 1889 Sanborn map shows that Swenson had the Stringer’s Hotel remodeled to remove the room for “servants,” which suggests that enslaved people originally potentially stayed there, given that “servant” and “dependency” were variant terms used for “slave” in urban spaces. The National Register of Historic Places Inventory notes that businesses on Congress Avenue did not have the financial capacity to maintain, let alone remodel, their properties right after the Civil War. This explains the twenty-year delay to remove the said “servants” room, no longer utilized by enslaved people in the 1880s. Further evidence also shows that Swenson himself had strong ties to slavery in Texas.

Black and white image of a headshot of S.M. Svensson
S.M. Svensson (via Wikipedia)

S. M Swenson was born in Sweden and came to New York as an immigrant in 1836 at the age of twenty. A few years after his arrival, Swenson worked as a mercantile trader. Through his trade dealings in the south, he befriended a slaveholder by the name of George Long, who then hired Swenson to work at his newly relocated plantation in Texas. A year later, when Long died due to poor health, Swenson married his widow, who then too died of tuberculosis three years later. By 1843, Swenson became a full-scale slaveholder in Texas through inheriting his now-deceased wife’s plantation. In 1848, he enlarged his property holdings by purchasing the adjoining plantation and expanding his cotton crop. In 1850, along with purchasing 182 acres a few miles outside of Austin, he bought the lot on Congress Avenue and constructed the Swenson Building and inside, the Stringer’s Hotel.

There are no records that detail the lives of enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel but other sources show that slaveholders expected slaves to fill a variety of roles in running their establishments on Congress Avenue. In his book, a Journey Through Texas, Frederick Olmstead describes his encounter with an enslaved woman who was responsible for tending to the hotel’s patrons along with upkeep and building maintenance. These slaves were also responsible for running errands and transporting goods. Many slaves also lived and traveled to and from homes and communities that formed on the outskirts of town. Traveling to and from their labor obligations or social engagements in their free time illuminates the various networks of movement created by the enslaved. Hence, given their relative independence, expectations, and responsibilities, it is not impossible to imagine enslaved people taking on leading roles in running the Stringer’s Hotel and other establishments in Austin.

Black and white photograph of the Avenue Hotel
Avenue Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries (via The Portal to Texas History)

The analysis of the Stringer’s Hotel through Sanborn maps and other qualitative sources illuminates the roles and occupations of enslaved people in Austin’s urban space. Unlike the enslaved people confined to the private domain of plantation estates, urban slaves worked in spaces with considerable mobility, meeting the needs of their owners and to fulfill their own social lives. Perhaps mapping the movement of enslaved people in this way, could allow for further interpretations of possible realities and lived experiences of enslaved people that archival texts obscure and make difficult to see.

Sources

  • “Negroes for Sale.” The Texas Almanac. December 27, 1862, 1 edition, sec. 34.
  • “Texas General Land Office Land Grant Database”, Digital Images, Texas General Land Office, Entry for Swenson, S M, Austin City Lots, Travis Co., TX, Patent no 429, vol.1
  • “Austin 1885 Sheet 5,” Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Map Collection, Perry-Castañeda Library, Austin, Texas.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law. A Journey through Texas: or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989: 50;
  • Austin City Sanborn Map, 1885;
  • Bullock Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, accessed December 3, 2019

Additional Readings

  • “Bullock House.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association, June 12, 2010.
  • Gail Swenson. “S. M. Swenson and the Development of the SMS Ranches,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas, (1960).
  • Gage, Larry Jay. “The City of Austin on the Eve of the Civil War.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 63, no. 3 (1960).
  • Kenneth Hafertepe. “Urban Sites of Slavery in Antebellum Texas” in Slavery in the City, Edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, University of Virginia Press. (2017)
  • Jason A. Gillmer. Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821-1871. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, (2017)


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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Documenting Slavery in East Texas: Transcripts from Monte Verdi

By Daniel J. Thomas III

Originally from Macon, Alabama, Julien Sidney Devereux, Sr (1805-1856) moved to east Texas where he eventually purchased land in Rusk County. This plat would eventually become Monte Verdi, one of the highest producing cotton plantations in the state, where over fifty Africans were enslaved. The Devereux family papers and the maps of the Texas General Land Office, including Julian Devereux’s will (1852) and a plat map of Rusk County (1846-1861), yield rich information about the institution of slavery.

Photograph of the first page of Julien Sidney Devereux, Sr.'s will

On May 7, 1852, Julien Devereux signed his final will and testament. Thirteen of the fourteen sections of his twelve-page will dealt explicitly with the institution of slavery. Sections two through six of his will present a rigid, hierarchical system to control the distribution of enslaved persons among his family members. Devereux named the slaves who, along with the furniture and cattle, were to be willed to his wife and daughter in sections two and three, respectively. Should his daughter not marry or bear children by the age of twenty-one, he noted that all willed enslaved people were to be turned over to his wife. In section four, he bequeathed a nineteen-year-old boy, a twelve-year-old girl, and “their increase” to one of his sons. The increase allotted to his son appears to allude to the arranged breeding of enslaved people and the enslavement of their unborn children. Section five established the equal distribution of Devereux’s remaining fifty-six enslaved persons and all of their future children among his remaining sons. Section six included three stipulations controlling his widow’s actions to ensure that his enslaved persons and property remained within his direct lineage. He declared that his wife must remain on the plantation and under the supervision of his chosen executors, that she could not sell any property or slaves during her lifetime, and that she would relinquish all willed property and enslaved people should she remarry.

The peculiar affection for the enslaved also emerges in the will. In section eight, Devereux appeared to reward an enslaved man and woman for their “long and faithful service” by allowing them to nurse his children. In addition, Devereux declared that the enslaved should never be sold to pay debts because they are “family slaves.” Instead, he reserved over eleven hundred acres of land to be sold if necessary. Finally, Devereux declared that family slaves become fixed by his will thus demonstrating the way enslavement became predetermined and hereditary.

Gomert, A. & Lungkwitz, Herman. Rusk County, map, 1871
Gomert, A. & Lungkwitz, Herman. Rusk County, map, 1871; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth89173/: accessed October 12, 2019), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas General Land Office.

The accompanying county map incorporated in this analysis of Devereux’s will challenges some common assumption about institutional slavery. To shore up the distribution of public property, the Republic of Texas Congress formed the General Land Office (GLO) in 1836. This map of Rusk County was produced by the GLO and represents plats of property purchased between 1846 and 1861. The density of the map shows that few plats appear to be large; the majority of holdings appear to be quite small and crowded near others. Second, Devereux’s plantation had one of the largest enslaved populations in the state of Texas, at fifty-six. In Rusk County, plantations were not isolated, rural locales with hundreds of enslaved people, as if often assumed. This map shows an densely-settled region where the number of enslaved people would have been similar o that of the Devereux plantation at Monte Verdi.

Collectively, these documents illuminate numerous aspects about the institution of slavery in Texas on the eve of the Civil War.

Julien Sidney Devereux Family Papers, 1766-1908, 1931, 1941, Box 2N215, Will, 1852-1854 Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. A Guide to the Julien Sidney Devereux Family Paper, 1766-1941; Volume/Box: 2n215

I  Julien Devereux . . . State of Texas, being of sound mind, do make this my last will and testament, hereby revoking all others.

  1. It is my will that after my decease my remains be interested in a suitable and christian like manner, in the burying ground adjacent to the Baptist Church in the neighborhood of the town of _______; a tomb of stone or brick to be erected over my remains with a  suitable headpiece of stone on which to be engraved the date of my birth and death.
  2. I give and bequeath unto my beloved wife Sarah Ann Devereux the following named slaves to ____: (1) Bill, a boy about twenty years old; 2) Gabby, a girl about sixteen years old, and her male child Franklin about two months old; 3) ____a woman about twenty four years old and her three sons, ____: Peter (the eldest), and George and Isaac (twins) about four years old, also her twin daughter, Kizzy and Emelisa about two years old, and such household and kitchen furniture as I may own at my death. I also give my said wife our ____ of whatever stock of cattle and hogs and ___ one fourth part of whatever stock of mules and horses I may own at my death and the one fourth part of such farming utensils as I may own at my death.
  3. I give and bequeath to my natural daughter Antoinette Devereux the following slaves, to wit: 1) Gino a man about twenty years of age; 2) Rhoda women about eighteen years of age and her two children to wit: Cynthia two years old and the female infant she now have about eight months old named ________________. I also give to Antoinette one horse, saddle and _______ one bed _____ and furniture and two cows and calves I also give said Antoinette her maintenance and education so hereafter provided. And should the said Antoinette be leaving no direct lineal heir of her body begotten then it is my will that said slaves and their increase shall revert to my child or children by my said wife Sarah Ann to be equally divided among them or their lineal heirs. And should said slaves die or any one or more of them before the said Antoinette shall arrive at the age of twenty one years, or before she may marry then it is my will that she should receive and have other slaves to be taken out of those hereafter bequeathed to my children by my wife  of equal value with such as may so die, to be set apart to her by my executors.
  4. I will and bequeath to my natural son Sidney Devereux, two slaves, to wit: Joe a boy about nineteen years old and Joanna girl about twelve years old together with their increase. And I also bequeath to the said Sidney our horse, saddle and bridle: One bed, ____ and furniture and two cows and calves. And I also give the said Sidney his maintenance and education as hereinafter provided. And should the said Sidney die leaving no child or children or the descendants of child or children then it is my will and desire that said slaves shall revert to my children by my wife Sarah Ann, or their lineal heir to be equally divided between them. And should one or both of said slaves die before the said Sidney shall arrive at the age of twenty one years then it is my will that he shall have and receive other slaves or slaves in lieu thereof in like manner as herein before provided for Antoinette Devereux.
  5. I hereby will and bequeath the residual of my property real, personal and mixed, choses in action, effects and rights of whatever description among which ___estimate fifty six slaves to my two sons Albert and Julien Devereux by my present wife, together and in common with such other child or children as she may hereafter have by me to be equally divided between my said two sons and such other child or children as may so be done. If there shall be but one of said sons living at my death and no other child born, then he is to have all the property herein bequeathed to both: if both of said sons are living at my death and no other child born, then said property to be divided between them: if there shall be at my death said two sons and one or more other child or children of my present wife living or posthumous, then it is my desire that said property shall be equally divided between all of said children. And for greater certainty I here give the names of the slaves mentioned and intended to pass to said children by this my 5th bequeath to the best of my resolution, to wit, 1 Scott 2 Jack Shaw 3 Henry 4 Luoius 5 Martin 6 Lewis 7 ___ 8 July 9 Daniel 10 Stephen 11 Levin 12 Randal 13 July? 14 Little Jack 15 Amos 16 Charles 17 ___ 18 Tom 19 Anthony 20 Walton 21 Richmond 22 Green 23 Arthur 24 Pam 25 Little Jesse 26 Nelson 27 Dennis 28 Mason 29 Harrison 30 Aaron 31 Anderson 32 Robert 33 Cola Tabby 34 Mary 35 Henry 36 Lev Mariah 37 Katy 38 Marha 39 Amey 40 Matilda 41 Eliza 42 Dea’nah 43 Makalah 44 Sarah 45 Jane 46 Phebe 47 Jinny 48 Elmina 49 Jiney 50 Louisa 51 Penial 52 Charlotte 53 Little Amey 54 Katy’s child not named and 55 & 56 (two others names not recollected, together with all the increase of said slaves. This my 5th bequeath is made charged with and subject to the following restrictions, uses and conditions to wit: That my present wife Sarah Ann remain on the plantation where we now reside, and under the supervision of my executors as hereinafter directed carry on the plantation for the maintenance of herself and her children and the two natural children Antoinette and Sidney and for the education of her own children as well as the said Antoinette and Sidney. And that she may be able to do so. It is my will that she have the use of the said plantation negroes stock, mules, farming utensils and other ___property appertaining to a plantation during her natural life or widowhood with his exception that as my children ______attain to the age of twenty one years- or if-______ the legacies and property bequeath to them by this will is to be delivered over to them respectively provided that my present residences and land to the extent of two hundred acres including the slaves shall not be sold during the lifetime of my said wife. And should my said wife-Sarah Ann again marry it is my will that there be a complete separation of her property and interests in all things of a _____ character from those of my children.
  6. I desire and bequeath to my said wife and her children all the real estate which I may own and possess at my death to be equally divided between them that is to say if I shall have one or more child or children, by her she is to have a childs part of said real estate in value equal to the part or share of said child or children to be laid off so as to include our present residences. My residences as I desire here to explain, consists of the mansion house and other buildings and four thousand acres of land more or less attached thereto in different survey_____as the William & _______and other lying in one body. The division of said land here ____plateau to be fairly and equally made by my executors.
  7. In the event I leave no child or children by my present wife, living or posthumous at my death, then I will and bequeath the property and its increase herin before devised to such child or children to my said wife and the said Antoinette and Sidney Devereux to be equally divided between them that is to say said property is to be equally divided between my said wife, the said Antoinette and the said Sidney or their lineal descendants provided I leave no child or children in being or posthumous by my said wife or the direct lineal heirs of such child or children by my said wife. Said decision to be made between my said wife and the said Antoinette and the said Sidney in three equal parts share and share alike.
  8. In consideration of the long and faithful service of the old negro slaves Scott and Gabby hereinfore bequeathed to my new sons Albert and Julian it is my will and desire that from and after they be exempt from compulsory personal labor further than to give such attention as they may be able in nursing and taking care of my children after my death; and I further will and desire that the said Scott and Gabby shall be humanely treated and will provided for by my executors.
  9. It is my will and desire that all my just debts be paid before distribution of my estate takes place. And in providing for the maintenance of my children I estimate the profile of my plantation as being ______for those purposes and pay my just debts. If, however tho fund arising from my plantation is insufficient for all the _______ properties, and it is deemed necessary by my executors to sell any portion of my estate for the payment of my debts, it is my desire that none of my slaves shall be sold. They are family slaves it is my will that they so remain after my death. I hereby designate as property to be sold for the payment of debts if necessary two tracts of land to with:  eleven hundred and seven acres the head right property of ____ Robert W Smith and Eight hundred and eighty acres known as the ____. I purchased of Doctor Elijah Doson or so much thereof as my executors may deem sufficient.
  10. Contrary to any wish desire or request of mine the legislation of the State of Texas at its last___ the second section of act entitled “an act changing the names of Antoinette _____ and Sidney May” which act was “approved January 3 1852.” said second section is in these words “That the said Antoinette Devereux and Sidney Devereux be and they are hereby declared capable in law of inheriting the property of their father Julien Devereux in the same manner as if they had been born in lawful wedlock – and that this act take effect and be in force from and after its passage”. Now, although it has long been my wish and desire that the names of the said Antoinette Scott and Sidney ___ should be changed as provided for by the first section of the above cited act, yet I never intended nor was it ever my will that they shall inherit my estate in the manner provided in the said second section . I do therefore now and forever hereafter by this my last will and testament most solemnly protest against the operation and effect of said second section of said act and desire that said second section may be appealed by act of said Legislature at the next session, the same having been passed without my knowledge consent or approbation and in direct violation of any wishes and desires. It is my will that the said Antoinette and Sidney be provided for and receive portions of my estate after my death only in such manner as is in this my last will and testament set forth and stated and in no other way.
  11. As I have before initiated, it is my will that a sufficient amount independent of the bequeath herein made be set apart and devoted to the maintenance and education of Antoinette Devereaux and Sidney Devereux, and my two sons Albert and Julien, and such other children of mine as may hereafter be born. And it is also my will that should the said Antoinette and Sidney or either of them die without lineal _____ of their body or bodies, the _______ of herein bequeathed is not in any way or under any circumstances to descend to or be inherited by any member of their mother family.
  12. My will is that my friend Doctor Peterson ___ Richardson be guardian of the person and property of my natural daughter Antoinette Devereux to superintend and direct her education and take care of her. And should my said wife deem it proper for Antoinette to be leave here I desire Doctor Richardson to take her and raise her. And it is my will and desire that my extended friend Col. William Wright Morris be the guardian of any natural son Sidney Devereux: as well of his person as his property and I desire that said Morris will consider the said Sidney wholly in his care and under his charge and permit him to ramble or wander off so as to become identified with his mothers people: That he will superintend the education and moral culture of the said Sidney and in a special manner prepare his mind for the study of the law by giving a proper direction to this education.
  13. It is my will that none of my slaves be sold. With due exception they are all family negroes, and my desire is that they so remain under the ____ plateau distribution fixed by this will: that they may be humanely treated and will be taken care of by those who may succeed me in the ownership of them.
  14. I do herby appoint my wife Sarah Ann Devereux, John Laudrew, Col. William Wright Morris, Doctor Peterson T. Richardson, and Doctor William M. ____ of Rush County and Doctor James H. ____ of Nagadoches County Texas (my trust worthy friends) my executors of this my last will and testament to execute and carry out all the terms and provisions of the _____. And it is my will that they or either one of them shall not be required to give bond and security as a condition to entering or the discharge of the duties herby imposed. It is also____my will and direction that no other action shall be had in the County Court in relation to the settlement of the estate herin disposed of then the probate and registration of this will and testament and a return of inventory of said estate. It is my desire and will that my wife Sarah ____ by the council and advice of any one or more of my other executors, as she may choose will take upon herself the supervision of my plantation for the purposes expressed in the will. That aided by my other executors she will attend to the hiring of overseers, the sale of produce, the investing of the proceeds of the plantation: That with the aid of said executor she will plan improvement of my plantation, preserve and take care of property, and above all she will attend strictly and carefully to the education of my two sons Albert and Julien and such other children as she may have by me.

I hereby appoint the said Sarah Anne Devereux guardian of the persons and property of my said sons Albert and Julian and such other child or children as she may have by me, and in case she should die then it is my will that Doctor Peterson T. Richardson will take the guardianship of said two sons and such other children as she may have as aforesaid.

The foregoing will of twelve and a half pages signed sealed and published in our presence and in the presence of each other. The foregoing twelve and a half pages contain my last will and testament executed at the town of Henderson on this 7th day of May AD 1852.

–Julien Sidney Devereux


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Bibliography
Gomert, A. & Lungkwitz, Herman. Rusk County, map, 1871; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth89173/: accessed October 12, 2019), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas General Land Office.

Julien Sidney Devereux Family Papers, 1766-1908, 1931, 1941, Box 2N215, Will, 1852-1854 Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin


You might also like:
The Enslaved and the Blind: State Officials and Enslaved People in Austin, Texas
Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past
White Women and the Economy of Slavery

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation

By Candice D. Lyons

In the spring of 1852, Benjamin Roper, overseer to Galveston area plantations Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote a short letter to his employer to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife . . . . He is now and has been since his misfortune at Dr. Whiting’s and will remain there until he is able to bear punishment when I shall bring him home and give him a very severe whiping [sic].” Roper postponed describing the events leading up to this act of brutality, however, he insisted that “if any negro (whether I have the controll [sic] of him or not) should ever give me the like provocation, I will deliberately take his life. I am now armed and it is my intention never to go into your field without, and to use them if necessary.”

Photograph of part of a letter sent by Benjamin Roper, a plantation overseer, in 1852 to his employer
Letter from May 3, 1852 (by author)

The recipient of this missive was Ashbel Smith, noted Texas statesman often hailed as both “the father of Texas medicine” and “the father of the University of Texas.” Known for his pioneering work in the treatment of yellow fever as well as his diplomatic endeavors, Smith spent the latter part of his life acting as a vocal proponent for women’s and African American education, serving as one of three commissioners tasked with establishing an “Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, for the benefit of the Colored Youths”—the institution that would eventually become Prairie View A&M University. This avowed investment is difficult to reconcile, however, with Smith’s years-long, active participation in the institution of chattel slavery, including his seeming complicity in his steward’s violent attempts at plantation management.

Shortly after the April 30 incident, Smith returned to his Texas holdings for a brief visit, after which Roper penned a follow-up message noting, “Lewis is here for a week or two until we get more out of the grass. Perhaps it may be some satisfaction for you to know that he as well as all the other negroes have behaved very well indeed since you left.” This bit of self-congratulation would prove premature, however, as between the writing of this letter and one dated June 23, 1852, those enslaved by Ashbel Smith mounted a sustained resistance (undoubtedly, at least in part, to Lewis’ stabbing) that would compel Roper to draft yet another letter to his employer noting that “Your negroes have for a long time enjoyed the reputation of being hard to manage yet I believed until now that I could control them. I am now satisfied that I cannot and being so satisfied I wish to resign.” It is clear from this communication that, as they had done in years past, the individuals enslaved by Ashbel Smith were challenging the conditions of their enslavement. This is evident in Roper’s comment a week later that “whilst I have been at one place [that is, one of Smith’s plantations] the work has been neglected at the other. Your negroes all need continual watching or rather continual flogging to make them do their work.”

Printed map of Galveston County for 1879
Map of Galveston County, 1879 via Library of Congress

Demoralized, Roper divulges that “there is not a single person [enslaved at Evergreen or Headquarters] in whom I can depend unless it be Abram, and I have not full confidence in him. Bob and Old Sam deceived me for a long time but I have found them out and in my opinion there are not two greater scoundrels on the place.” Roper’s plaintive airing of grievances highlights how those enslaved by Smith shifted the balance of power after a heinous act of violence, contesting the circumstances under which they were expected to labor in ways marking them, in Roper’s view, as “scoundrels.”

Black and white image of Ashbel Smith
Ashbel Smith via Wikimedia Commons

This situation was thrown into crisis once again in 1857, as Ashbel Smith began to receive extensive correspondence from Roper concerning the practices of his replacement, the newly hired overseer, Mr. Page. Roper still lived in the area and spoke regularly with Smith. In February 1857, he wrote to note that Page was rarely if ever seen in the fields and that, rather, “the negroes are called up and receive orders at the house and then they go off and do as they please.” While this lack of oversight may have been to the benefit of the enslaved on one hand, it signaled a type of neglect that would leave them especially vulnerable to medical calamity, on the other. On March 4, 1857, Roper writes, “Ann gave birth to a [daughter] since you left which died a few days after. I knew not of its birth or sickness until after its death, if I had I should have gone to have seen it.” He adds, “I have since told Albert and Abram that if anyone was sick hereafter before your return to let me know it”—a request that seems to imply that Roper attributes the death of Ann’s child to some failure to attend to the needs of those enslaved on Evergreen Plantation on Mr. Page’s part.

Such was the fate of these individuals: despite Smith’s reputation as an upstanding and altruistic Texas luminary, the people he enslaved spent their lives subject to the whims of a perpetually absent “master” and were routinely made to contend with insufficient resources, violent overseers, and inadequate health care.

Image of a statue of Ashbel Smith in Baytown, Texas
Ashbel Smith is memorialized in a statue in Baytown, Texas (via Wikimedia Commons)

Read the full letters from the Ashbel Smith Papers, 1823-1926 here:


Sources:
Ashbel Smith Papers, 1823-1926, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
“Evergreen Plantation.” Handbook of Texas Online.
Elizabeth Silverthrone. “Smith, Ashbel.” Handbook of Texas Online.

You might also like:
White Women and the Economy of Slavery
Love in the Time of Texas Slavery
Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Oil and Money: Texas Politics, 1929-1932

by Rachel Ozanne

The late Professor Norman D. Brown was a fixture of the UT Austin History Department for nearly four decades, and his classes on Texas history were popular favorites among undergraduates and graduate students. In 1984, Texas A&M University Press published Brown’s Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug: Texas Politics, 1921-1928, which is still considered the main source for the state-level political history of that era. In the ensuing decades, Brown worked steadily on a sequel, which he never published before his retirement from UT Austin in 2015.

That sequel, Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929-1932, unveils little known stories of the high drama of the Texas political scene at the beginning of the Great Depression. Yet these stories might never have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the efforts of some of Brown’s devoted former students and colleagues.

Brown donated his personal papers and research files to the Briscoe Center for American History when he retired. Unknown to many, this donation included his unfinished book manuscript. A former Master’s student of Brown, Josiah Daniel, learned of the manuscript’s existence, and, with the support of the Briscoe Center, contracted with the UT History Department to find an editor for the manuscript. In 2017, I was hired to update the scholarly references in the manuscript’s footnotes and to write an introduction for the manuscript, summing up its main ideas and themes. I was quickly delighted with the rich details of the highs and lows of Texas gubernatorial, legislative, and party politics that Brown portrayed. The manuscript came to me without a title, but I settled on Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys as key images that encapsulated the major ideas and issues of this critical era in Texas history.

“Biscuits” refers to the on-going role that personality and populism played in Texas politics. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party dominated the state of Texas. The Republican Party was too closely associated with Abraham Lincoln and the defeat in the Civil War to appeal to most white Texans, and most black Texans were prevented from voting due to Jim Crow laws that in effect disfranchised them. In the 1920s and 30s the Texas Democratic Party was divided between two factions that fought for control of the party: business progressives, who sought to reform certain aspects of government to provide improved social services, and populists, who sought to prevent the expansion of the size and scope of government and claimed to appeal to the people, mostly poor, rural white Texans.

Ma Ferguson sitting at her desk.

Ma Ferguson, 1933 (Paralta Studios, Austin. Briscoe Center for American History)

In Brown’s narrative, Jim “Pa” and Miriam “Ma” Ferguson best represented the populist wing of the Democratic Party. Pa Ferguson was governor in the 1910s, but was barred from holding public office after being convicted of misappropriation of public funds and other charges in his 1917 impeachment trial. Ma Ferguson ran for reelection to the governorship in 1932, promising “two governors for the price of one.” In explaining his political philosophy, Pa asserted that you’ve got to keep the people happy, or “give them a biscuit.” As long as you kept giving them people biscuits, they would be “for you,” but as soon as the biscuits ran out, “they [would] not be for you any longer.” The Fergusons’ populist appeal was successful in 1932, but they soon found themselves falling from public favor, as new rumors of abuses of public funds and power surfaced again.

Texans also argued among themselves about “the dole” and the extent to which they were comfortable with government intervention. The Great Depression presented Texans with a social crisis of poverty and unemployment the likes of which they had never seen, making them more receptive to the possibility of federal and state programs than ever before. Brown notes that every successful gubernatorial candidate in Texas in the 1930s ran for office promising  to provide a pension program for elderly Texans, but efforts to implement these plans were always prevented by the state legislature.

East Texas Oil Fields, Derricks and Buildings (Briscoe Center for American History)

Texans also flirted with stricter regulations on production for the oil industry—the “nodding donkeys” of the era—particularly regulations that would limit the number of barrels produced per day. Brown documents what happened when a massive oil field was discovered in east Texas near Kilgore in late 1930. Wildcat, individual producers rushed to the area to drill wells to capture as much oil as possible, hoping to make a quick profit, before large producers came in to dominate the area. Their efforts led to massive decreases in prices and to environmental waste, as much of the oil evaporated or flooded nearby fields, when it could not be contained. These smalltime producers opposed efforts by Governor Ross Sterling to regulate production, arguing that limiting production in order to stabilize and increase prices violated the law (it did). Governor Sterling eventually declared martial law in east Texas to try to enforce production quotas, but one-by-one oil companies filed court injunctions that made the attempt to enforce production quotas impossible. In the long-term the legislature did pass new laws allowing for better restriction of the oil industry, but too late to affect the situation in Kilgore.

Vice President John N. Garner –“Cactus Jack– and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, c. 1930-35 (Briscoe Center for American History)

Brown’s book concludes with a dramatic recounting of the Democratic Party’s Primary Convention in Chicago in 1932, as Texans considered whether to throw their support behind native son John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner or New Yorker Franklin D. Roosevelt—revealing the critical role that Texans ultimately played in securing the nomination for Roosevelt.

These stories and others make Brown’s work highly recommended for lovers of Texas history or political history in general.

Norman D. Brown with Rachel Ozanne, ed., Biscuits, The Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929-1932

Want to know more? You can listen to Rachel Ozanne talk about Brown’s book on the Texas Standard’s website.

George Norris Green’s The Establishment in Texas Politics: the Primitive Years, 1938-1957 picks up the story of Texas political history about where Brown’s Biscuits leaves off.

Walter L. Buenger’s The Path to a Modern South emphasizes the economic developments of Texas history as well as Texans’ shifting understandings of their state identity in the years leading up to and through the era of Brown’s work.

Darlene Hine Clark’s Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas highlights the political history of African Americans in Texas in the first part of the twentieth century.

Neil Foley’s The White Scourge provides important insight into the racial history of Texas during the era of Jim Crow, by examining not just the issue of white and black racial conflict, but the complexities of racial tension in a state with a substantial Mexican American population in the early twentieth century as well.

The Enslaved and the Blind: State Officials and Enslaved People in Austin, Texas

By Daniel Josiah Thomas III

Black and white image of the Neill-Cochran House
(Used with permission of the Neill-Cochran House)

On November 6, 1855, Washington Hill commissioned Abner H. Cook to build a southern plantation house in Austin, Texas. The Texas Historical Commission reported that “the property worth $900 in August 1855 was worth $8,000 when Hill paid his taxes for 1856.”  When the two-story limestone home was completed, Hill had greatly overextended his financial resources. In an attempt to retain the property, Hill sought tenants to help with his costs. Fortunately for him, the Texas Legislature would approve funding for a program that would help. In 1856, the same year Hill’s home was completed, the legislature voted to found an Asylum for the Blind. Austin’s asylum would provide initial financial relief to Hill, but it also led to the use of enslaved people on his property.

1921 Sanborn Map of Austin featuring former compound of Texas School for the Blind
1921 Sanborn Map of Austin featuring former compound of Texas School for the Blind (via Library of Congress)

From 1856 to 1919, the Texas State Asylum for the Blind took copious and painstakingly detailed notes of all business-related meetings. One of the earliest entries recorded the asylum entering into a contract with Washington Hill for the purpose of using his property. An entry made on October 26, 1856 states:

Washington L. Hill proposes to lease his residence in the city of Austin for the use of the school for the term of two years commencing on the 20 Nov[em]b[e]r next for the term of nine hundred dollars per year payable quantity in advance — which proposition was accepted by the Board and R. L Townes was appointed to enter into contract with L. Hill.[1] (See below)

Image of a page of Texas State Asylum for the Blind's meeting notes
(Photo by Author)

The legal stipulation that he receive the entire year’s payment from the asylum in advance speaks to the urgency of Hill’s financial situation. Nonetheless, having extended control of his property to the School for the Blind allowed for the school to do what was necessary to conduct business.

Meeting files for 1860 illuminate how agents of the Texas State Legislature and their enslaved persons were vital to the school’s successful operation. Several entries that took place during a meeting on January 16, 1860 reveal both the enslaver’s name and the role their enslaved persons were to have at the School for the Blind. The meeting file states:

“The following proceedings were had. Ordered, that the Superintendent be authorized to employ Negro woman of W L Chalmers as cook  $18.00 per month, subject to be discharged upon notice by trustee: Also, the negro woman of Ed Clark, at $15 per month, subject to his discharge upon notice of Trustees: Also, to retain in the employ of the institute the Negro man of Col Neal at $20 per month and clothing. . . . The salary for the negro girl belonging to Doch Maynire was filed at $10 dollars per month instead of $12 dollars as first agreed upon. . . . The meeting then adjourned.[2] (See below)

Image of a page of Texas State Asylum for the Blind's meeting notes
(Photo by Author)

The two women, one girl, and one man mentioned at this meeting reveal the presence of four enslaved people laboring at Austin’s School for the Blind in 1860. In all these instances, the school paid each enslaver a monthly rate to use their enslaved persons for the benefit of the school’s operation.  While one enslaved woman was reported to have served as a cook, the role of the others was not mentioned. The identity of two of the men responsible for the renting of these enslaved people, however, is revealed by Texas’ ninth Governor, Francis Richard Lubbock in his memoirs.  W. L. Chalmers and Edward Clark were key members of the Texas State Legislature. Lubbock identified Chalmers as an “assistant clerk” of the Seventh Legislature, in 1857 and  “chief clerk” of the Ninth Legislature in 1861.[3] Edward Clark was the “Secretary of State” to Governor Elisha M. Pease from 1853-1857.[4] Clark would serve as the Lieutenant Governor of Texas from 1859-1861 and the Confederate Texas Governor in 1861. Thus, the property currently known as the Neill-Cochran house was once a place where both enslaved people and the highest-ranking state officials, converged to ensure the well-ordered functioning of the Texas School for the Blind.

Photograph of Historical Marker at the Neill-Cochran House Museum
Historical Marker at Neill-Cochran House Museum (via Flickr)

Sources for this article:
[1]  An Inventory of School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Meeting Files 1856-1919, 1979-2015, Volume 1989/073-28, Texas State Asylum for the Blind/Blind Institute/Texas School for the Blind, 1856-1919, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX.
[2] Ibid, 24-25
[3] Frances Lubbock, Six Decades in Texas: Or Memoirs of Frances Richard Lubbock, Governor of Texas in War Time 1861-1863, Austin: B. C. Jones & co., printers, 1900), 223, 329.
[4] Ibid., 195.

An Inventory of School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Meeting Files 1856-1919, 1979-2015, Volume 1989/073-28, Texas State Asylum for the Blind/Blind Institute/Texas School for the Blind, 1856-1919, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX.

Evelyn M. Carrington. The Neill-Cochran Museum House, 1855-1976: A Century of Living from Texas History. Waco, TX: Texian Press for the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Texas, 1977.

Kenneth Hafertepe. Survey and Multiple Property Nomination of Abner Cook Structures in Austin. 1989.

Francis Richard Lubbock. Six Decades in Texas; or, Memoirs of Francis Richard Lubbock, Governor of Texas in War Time, 1861-63. Edited by Cadwell Walton Raines. Austin: B. C. Jones & Co.,1900.


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Fandangos, Intemperance, and Debauchery
Paying for Peace: Reflections on the “Lasting Peace” Monument

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Odds are Stacked Against Us: Oral Histories of Black Healthcare in the U.S.

By Thomaia Pamplin

Thomaia J. Pamplin is a graduate student at the University of Texas MD Anderson/UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Pamplin’s research focuses on the elderly, black community in Houston and their interactions with the healthcare system. She hopes her research will advance Narrative Medicine, a field that highlights the importance of knowing patients beyond their symptoms and causes. Pamplin aspires to be a doctor who lives up to that ideal in her own career.

Distrust in the U.S. healthcare institution has been pervasive in the black community for many generations. Although young African Americans may be far removed from atrocities like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which hundreds of black men were inoculated with syphilis without their informed consent and without any treatment, the mistrust seems to be handed down through subsequent generations. This lack of confidence in the healthcare system is reflected in studies that show the black infant mortality rate in the U.S. is twice as high as white infant mortality. The excess risk experienced by African-American infants reflects factors that are unique to the black experience in the U.S., including area-level poverty, differential access to pre-and perinatal care and other socioeconomic differences.[1] Studies have also shown that patients’ perceptions of their health care providers’ attitudes toward their ethnic or mental health status affect a patient’s decision to even pursue healthcare provisions.[2] Stereotypes like “the strong black woman,” also pressure women to not seek help or when seeking help, to feel as though better care is provided for non-black patients.[3]

Unidentified subject, onlookers and Dr. Walter Edmondson taking a blood test as part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Photo Credit: NARA, Atlanta, GA via Wikimedia Commons)

The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas reported that “Blacks of all socioeconomic levels are disproportionately affected by stress-related diseases that translate into a radicalized life expectancy.” They also found that throughout the U.S. there is a shortage of mental health professionals especially serving in low-income areas. There is a wide gap between the life expectancy of Black and White people in the U.S.; this gap “can be attributed to higher death rates among Black men and women due to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes perinatal conditions, and homicide.” Many of these ailments are the leading causes of death for other marginalized groups in the U.S. Some of the recommendations this report makes is to expand Medicaid, health communities’ model, increase representation of black healthcare professionals, strengthen the social and economic structure of these communities, and promote health in all legislative policy.[4]

There are roughly one million practicing physicians in the US and less than 6 percent of those physicians are African-American.[5] Meaning that for the 44 million black residents of the U.S., there are about 60,000 black practicing physicians.[6] That is one black doctor for every 700 black patients. This is not to say that only African-American physicians can treat African-American patients, but distrust in healthcare institutions could potentially be alleviated by having providers be of the same ethnicity as the patient.

As the statistics of black health disparities rise and the need for healthcare intervention is increasing, the black church in the U.S. has the potential to mobilize people to seek medical care. Studies have shown that health interventions in black communities through the church have been successful, especially in early cancer detection.[7] Women play a  “cornerstone” role in black churches and one study of Pastors’ perceptions on the health status of the black church and African-American communities found that “African-American women focus much of their time and energy caring for others within their church and less on their own health and well-being.” [8]

One way to understand the causes of racial health disparities, and the role of women in health care, inside and outside of black churches, is through oral histories, such as the interviews I conducted among lower-income women from a small congregation in southeast Texas. Two of their stories follow.

Black Nurse in North Carolina, March 1962 (via DPLA)

All Eyes on Mindi
“I remember being in school, in the classroom and not understanding what was being taught,” Mindi told me one day at a public library in South Texas. As she talked, I noticed big brown eyes peek from the edge of the wall near us. Glancing at me then, at her mom’s back, Mindi’s daughter was intimidatingly protective for a forty pound, four-year-old. Her thick, black hair was twisted in pink bow berets, somewhat resembling her mother’s short locs. The little girl skipped away after gathering the intel she needed.

“I was never bold,” Mindi told me “I was quiet and shy. And then I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings… but now I can’t be that way anymore.”

Most of the 33-year-old mother’s career has been in education which is unsurprising when you hear her musical Texan accent. It sounds like at any point she can sing a song about a task, which would probably motivate all the kids in the library to start working.

“I would have blackouts and zone out,” Mindi continued.  She had never been diagnosed with a learning disorder; however, these episodes did affect how the future educator learned. “What the teacher would say went over my head… I would have to focus ten times harder and read chapters twice over…I was always the one who needed the curve.”

In adulthood, the blackouts occurred at the worst of times, but the third incident was the most frightening. One day, while Mindi was driving her car, she had a blackout seizure and struck a pole. She didn’t drive for eight months after the accident. This incident forced her health to become her family’s top priority.

In June 2016, four months before her first seizure, Mindi’s eldest son, twelve-year-old Jay, moved out of her home and into his grandmother’s. “I was always so excited to have a family of my own, so what really caused the sickness is when I felt like I lost my son…My family was separated, my body just–” She paused, her hands were in front of her chest, the back of her hands faced me as one cupped the other. She moved her chest forward as if the words could be pulled from her, but instead, she relaxed her body, took a breath, and restarted. “He was there, but I felt like I was grieving him. I felt like I took it too hard.”

Mindi attributed the conflict she had with her son to her personality, “my son took advantage and ran with it…He would run away from home over the slightest thing. If I asked him to wash the dishes and I’m asking him for the third time, I’m not going to ask as nicely. Then bam! [He’d] run away.” She recalled how he would talk back to her but not to her husband, she didn’t believe he respected boundaries with her, but in actuality, she recalled, “those boundaries weren’t set with him, with my husband, or with my coworkers. I had to go and do that at the age of 32.”

Mindi began to see neurologists in efforts to treat her seizures. She took numerous tests, but the results would always come back normal. “I remember being hooked up to all these gears, and the physician would be doing random things to try to make me have a seizure.” He tested her as if she were epileptic, though Mindi knew that was not the case. “I just felt like based off my symptoms, he should have done different things to make me have a seizure…Rather than doing all the things by the book. I thought he should have gone outside of the box…read a little deeper into my demeanor.”

“I remember asking God to help me. I don’t want to be a victim. Deuteronomy 30:19, God says we have the power to control the mind. So, we get to choose.” Mindi internalized this idea; she would tell herself, “Mindi, you can’t be quiet and shy, speak up. If this didn’t work, then go to another doctor.” She became firmer with her physicians because her triggers were continuously overlooked by them, until finally, she met with a specialist who she felt saw her condition for what it was. “I felt like the ball was back in my court,” she said. “My best doctor is the psychiatrist that I’m seeing now. When he diagnosed me, he didn’t use all these medical terms. He put it into a form that I could understand, he explained that it was a chemical imbalance…He explained what my brain was doing and why. I wasn’t just blown off…I actually feel like I have a personal relationship with him…He wanted to see my symptoms and I was able to actually have a full-blown anxiety attack in front of him… His approach seemed more fact-based rather than assumption, that’s what I liked.”

“I have a lot of eyes on me. They’re waiting on my next move” Mindi said of her family as her daughter dashed into my view again, glancing at the both of us. According to Mindi, her increased self-advocacy has even affected the way her children communicate. “If they ever feel some type of way,” Mindi said, “they say it, and I can now give them an answer on their level to make them understand.” For her mental health, Mindi said “I can’t let anything linger. I can talk now freely…open[ly] and honest[ly] and however you receive it, I’m sorry that’s how you receive it because I have to say it for myself.”

The Treatment of Not “Very Important People”
I met with Canjie in her home in southeast Texas. Her living room had dark hardwood floors and a giant widescreen TV on the wall. The evening news was on. Canjie is a woman in her 60s. She’s tall and has a short wispy afro, along with a sweet small grin that frequently lights up her face when she greets you or laughs.

Canjie learned the importance of self-advocacy after the first time her mother became drastically ill. “She always had heart trouble,” Canjie told me. One day, about twenty-seven years ago, she called her mother from work, only to hear mother “talking out of her head,” unexpectedly she seemed mentally unwell. Canjie told her, “Momma, get ready I’m coming down there.” She drove from Houston to San Antonio, even though her mother insisted she not come. When she arrived in San Antonio, Canjie’s sister and son took her mother to see her primary care physician, a man she had been seeing for decades. “She trusted him,” Canjie remembered. Though to her family, Canjie’s mother seemed to clearly be in pain and very confused, the doctor said nothing was wrong with her. The next day, they took Canjie’s mother to see the same physician because she was increasingly unwell. Her son and the doctor argued, they “almost got into it,” Canjie said, because of the neglect her mother was receiving even after being in his care for years. Canjie remembers the older white male doctor condescendingly shaking his finger in her 24-year-old son’s face and her son angrily told him to take his finger away. Canjie’s sister had already put their mother back in the van they had come in. They had to return home quickly because a shooting had erupted in the area, “there was always some shooting going near [my sister’s] house,” where Canjie’s mother stayed.

They decided to take her to the ER, the next day “[we] found out her gall bladder was about to burst.” She remembers the ER doctor saying, “Oh yes, we’ve got to do surgery.” He also told them that their mother would not have much time to live without treatment. This incident motivated Canjie throughout her life to advocate better for herself and loved ones. “These doctors…they’ve got a lot of patients and it’s just about a job for them,” she said.

Her mother did pass away eventually, and afterwards, Canjie decided she wanted to find the doctor that had so egregiously dismissed her family. She found that he was illegally prescribing drugs to his family and other people, “so they had arrested him,” she reported. “This man was not right,” she told her family, “he didn’t give a damn about Momma. He was just making money…She made it through that, but it was a mess, I promise you that.”

Texas Hospital, 1970 (via Wikimedia Commons)

In most clinics, Canjie believed people were “being treated like cattle.” She recalled going to one’s doctor’s office, giving a few details of symptoms to a medical assistant, then only being in contact with a doctor for less than five minutes, before he diagnosed her and described her medication. She also believed that she was prescribed medication too quickly at times. “My potassium was low,” she recalled, “and right away, [my physician] wanted to write me a medication, and I said ‘No, let me see what I can do.’ So, I came home, and I started eating bananas every day. When I went back to him, my potassium was normal. I would’ve gotten that medicine for nothing.” This was 15 years ago, and she has never had a problem with potassium insufficiency since.

She does have favorable healthcare experiences, including a primary care physician, Dr. S. “What I liked about him [was] we could talk. He didn’t rush you. You know, these doctors get you and try to rush you out because they have the next patient to get [to] because of insurance [companies] and stuff. Well Dr. S, he was on that same kind of insurance, but he would sit you in his office and talk to you for 30 minutes. He didn’t rush you out… you’d have the time to ask him all kinds of questions.”

“I really loved being his patient,” she continued, “I liked his nurse. I liked the whole experience, but he decided 20 years down the road…that he wanted to do the VIP program. That’s where doctors have specific patients that pay them and have 24 hours access to them. So, they pay them not only what the insurance pays but outside of that… another $2000 a month or something of that nature,” she explained. Dr. S asked Canjie if she wanted to join the program, but she declined. “It’s for the chronically ill,” she said, “and rich [people]” she added lightheartedly, “not for me, you know?” As she said this, I searched her face for anger or disappointment, but there was no trace of resentment for not being included as a “Very Important Person” with her favorite primary care physician. 

Conclusions
Mindi faced a problem that many parents and teachers experience, the weight of being responsible for many children’s upbringing. She was responsible for the development of her own children, as a Sunday-school and dance teacher, her community’s children, and as an educator, dozens in her district.

Her personality was such that her own needs and desires were not prioritized by others or herself at times. But with the intensity of her seizure condition increasing, her priorities changed. It was a very difficult road to becoming a better advocate for herself in every sphere, especially as a patient.

Mindi is typical of trends seen in black churches where their female members take on a heavy load of responsibility to others that can become detrimental to their own health. One reason Mindi wanted to share her story with me was to encourage other women with similar lifestyles, to start saying “no” more often, to take on less responsibility, and to prioritize their own health in order to live a better life.

Canjie’s experience demonstrates the difficulty of achieving good results even with advocacy. She learned to be a better advocate when her mother’s health was in danger. She used that knowledge to cut the costs of her own healthcare treatment and find physicians who she thought treated her well. Ultimately, Canjie settled for lesser healthcare experiences because her favorite physician could no longer afford to see her or anybody who could not pay the “VIP” price.

What’s at stake here is the survival of marginalized people. There is an incredibly difficult road to advocating enough for one’s self or family. The amount of advocacy needed is drastically different among different groups of people. The doubled mortality rate of black infants compared to white infants shows this. Even with evident advocacy, good treatment is still inaccessible for certain people.

There are dozens of stories like Mindi’s and Canjie’s that have been publicized and many generation’s worth of stories that have not reached the public.

This research was supported by the UT College of Liberal Arts Engaged Scholar Initiative.


References:
[1] Lauren M. Rossen, Diba Khan, and Kenneth C. Schoendorf, “Mapping Geographic Variation in Infant Mortality and Related Black–White Disparities in the US,” Epidemiology 27: 5 (2016). doi:10.1097/ede.0000000000000509
[2] Akhavan, S., Tillgren P., “Client/Patient Perceptions of Achieving Equity in Primary Health Care: A Mixed Methods Study,” International Journal of Equity Health 14:65 (2015). doi:10.1186/s12939-015-0196-5
[3] Nicolaidis, C., Timmons, V., Thomas, M.J., et al., “’You don’t go tell White people nothing’: African American women’s perspectives on the influence of violence and race on depression and depression care,” American  Journal of Public Health. 100:8 (2018):1470–1476. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2009.161950
[4] Michelle Roundtree, “The State of Black Lives in Texas Health Report Health Report,” The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis. March 2019
[5] Kaiser Family Foundation. “Professionally Active Physicians.” https://www.kff.org/
[6] United States Census. https://www.census.gov.
[7] Slade, J.L., Holt, C.L., Bowie, J., et al. “Recruitment of African American Churches to Participate in Cancer Early Detection Interventions: A Community Perspective,” Journal of Religious Health 57:2 (2018):751–761. doi:10.1007/s10943-018-0586-2
[8] Gross, T.T., Story, C.R., Harvey, I.S., Allsopp, M., Whitt-Glover, M., “’As a Community, We Need to be More Health Conscious’: Pastors’ Perceptions on the Health Status of the Black Church and African-American Communities,” Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 5:3 (2018):570–579. doi:10.1007/s40615-017-0401-x

To learn more, consider these suggestions for further reading:
“The Never-Ending Mistreatment of Black Patients” by Jessica Nutik Zitter (The New York Times)
“The State of Black Lives in Texas Health Report” by Michell A. Roundtree Ph.D., et al, March 2019
“Doctors Don’t Always Believe You When You’re a Black Woman” by Joanne Spataro (VICE)
“Black Women are Dying from a Lack of Access to Reproductive Health Services” by Lathasa D. Mayes (TIME)
“America is Failing its Black Mothers” by Amy Roeder (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

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Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)
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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Dean Page Keeton and Academic Freedom at UT Austin: Three Archival Letters

By Josiah M. Daniel, III

One bonus of archival research is to discover documents irrelevant to the topic but so evocative that they can’t be ignored. In the State Bar of Texas archives, I found three letters from June 1960 between W. Page Keeton (1909-1999), Dean of the School of Law of The University of Texas and two lawyers. Those letters caused a detour from my project for a while.

Black and white image of W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974
W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974 (via Law School Yearbook, 1959)

Homer L. Bruce, a tax-law partner of the Houston law firm Baker & Botts, sent the first letter to Keeton on June 15, 1960, with “carbon copies” to nine prominent members of the legal profession in Texas. Six days later, one of those nine recipients, a renowned oil and gas lawyer in a Fort Worth firm, Robert E. Hardwicke, also wrote Keeton. Both letters complained strongly about an article just published in the law school’s Texas Law Review by a UT tax-law professor, J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr.. The article was titled “ABC—From A to Z” and the letter writers were outraged that Wilkinson criticized a tax benefit for oil and gas companies known as the “percentage depletion allowance.” The third letter is Keeton’s June 28 response.

Image of letter from Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton dated June 15, 1960
Image of letter from Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton dated June 15, 1960

Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton, June 15, 1960 (State Bar of Texas, Archives Dept., via author)

The challenged article seems unremarkable today. Wilkinson’s topic was the “ABC” transaction, common in the oil-and-gas business. A producing property’s owner may sell a “production payment,” or a fixed quantity of the minerals to be produced, to a purchaser in a manner that takes advantage of the federal income-tax “allowance,” or deduction, of 27-1/2% of the property’s income, available to oil-producing taxpayers for the “depletion” resulting from extraction of the minerals in the ground. Through patient examples, Wilkinson demonstrated that the ABC deal was not always as tax-advantageous as was believed. The article did refer to the allowance as “gratuitous.” And that observation drew the ire of Bruce and Hardwicke, who amplified their criticism by insisting that enemies of the depletion allowance—specifically, Hubert H. Humphrey—would use Wilkinson’s characterization of the percentage depletion allowance as “ammunition.”

Image of J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr's June 1960 article in Texas Law Review
Wilkinson’s June 1960 article in Texas Law Review (via www.heinonline.com)

In June 1960, when these letters were written, the Democratic Party’s national convention was a month away, and one still-active candidate for the presidential nomination was indeed Humphrey, then a two-term Senator from Minnesota who had consistently fought the depletion allowance in Congress. His fight against that and other “tax loopholes” had been unsuccessful but earned him respect as a reformer. In Texas, however, the depletion allowance was a sacred cow. The Texas Law Review had published an earlier article defending the depletion allowance and the Chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, Ernest O. Thompson, wrote and spoke in favor of the allowance, and virtually all of the national legal literature and newspaper coverage in Texas about the allowance defended it. And Humphrey’s rival from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a protector of it. Humphrey later became LBJ’s vice-president but “never gave up” and, finally in 1975, was gratified to see Congress abolish this tax “loophole.”

Black and white photograph of Hubert H. Humphrey
Hubert H. Humphrey (via WikimediaCommons)

The addressee of the two letters, Keeton, was well acquainted with the oil and gas industry and its issues. He had earned the LL.B. in 1931 at UT, was hired to teach there, and quickly gained recognition in the field of torts, the law of civil injuries and wrongful death. During World War II, he served in Washington as an executive of the Petroleum Administration for War. After a stint as dean of the Oklahoma University law school, he accepted the deanship of UT’s law school in 1949, serving until 1974. He distinguished himself at both law schools by fostering racial integration and by continuing to teach torts as well as serving as dean. The law school grew during his deanship, and UT law alumni/ae revere Keeton. The city of Austin renamed the street alongside the law school for him and he is buried in the State Cemetery by gubernatorial proclamation.

Moreover, Keeton was stalwart and adept, in protecting academic freedom at the law school. One innovative key to his success there was to liberate the school from overreliance on legislative appropriations by creating the UT Law School Foundation to receive alumni/ae contributions. Important supporters of this initiative were law graduates who attained positions of power within the oil and gas industry. For instance, Rex G. Baker of Humble Oil was a key supporter of the Foundation—and also a staunch defender of the depletion allowance.

Those relationships did not deter him. Keeton formulated a masterful response to the two letters that foreclosed any further discussion. “You realize, of course,” he began, “that I cannot act as any kind of a censor and do not even attempt to act as such with respect to what goes in the Review.” Having matter-of-factly vindicated academic freedom, the Dean added that he did not read Wilkinson to make any judgment about “merits or demerits of the percentage depletion allowance.” And by pointing out that the ABC structure does not always work as expected, “Wilkinson may have done a service to the oil industry.” Keeton also observed that the challenged word “gratuitous” was simply “a descriptive term” indicating that the amount of the tax deduction was not tied to the cost of the property; the tax benefit was indeed essentially free to the oil and gas taxpayer.

Picture of a letter from Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce dated June 28, 1960
Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce, June 28, 1960 (State Bar of Texas, Archives Dept., via author)

Academic freedom at UT has had a long history. In 1917, when Governor James E. Ferguson vetoed appropriations for UT because the President would not dismiss faculty to whom Ferguson objected, the Legislature, at the urging of UT alumni/ae, impeached and removed him. In his 1986 oral history interview, Keeton recounted less spectacular but nonetheless significant instances during his tenure of politicians and the Board of Regents seeking to meddle with the faculty and academic matters, efforts Keeton successfully repulsed. But Keeton’s defense of academic freedom was not always public, as in the example of these previously unknown letters in the archive. Keeton’s handling of that situation in June 1960 highlights the ongoing task of University leaders to protect academic freedom, and it burnishes both Keeton’s legacy and the reputation of UT as a place for free exchange of knowledge and of viewpoints.

The State Bar of Texas’s Archives Department, also known as the “Gov. Bill and Vara Daniel Center for Legal History,” contains the Bar’s permanent records. The Archives’ professional archivist also manages and provides access to the collections of the Texas Bar Historical Foundation there. The archives are located in the Texas Law Center in Austin, Texas. See https://www.texasbar.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=State_Bar_Archives. The three letters were contributed to this archive in 1992 by J. Chrys Dougherty, a historically minded lawyer; his father in law, Ireland Graves, was one of the nine cc recipients of the three letters.

Josiah Daniel (UT Law, J.D. 1978; UT History, M.A. 1986) is a Retired Partner in Residence of the international law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP in its Dallas, Texas office. After four decades of law practice, he now is focusing on the history of the legal profession in Texas and is writing a biography of Dallas congressman Hatton W. Sumners (1875-1962), based on his papers in the Dallas Historical Society’s archive. His C.V. is on his blog: http://blog-josiahmdaniel3.blogspot.com/2018/03/cv.html. He may be reached at jdaniel@velaw.com.

Sources for this article include:

Lewis L.Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: UT Press, 1973).

“W. Page Keeton, An Oral History Interview” (Austin: UT Austin School of Law, Tarlton Law Library, Legal Bibliography Series No. 36 (1992) 49-52, 69-74.

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (N.Y., Harper, 1963)

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

Banner image for the post Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-Led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

By Micaela Valadez

The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important for the history of Mexican Americans, women, and labor organization because it bridged the two other major moments for Mexican and Mexican American labor activism: the Pecan Shellers strike in San Antonio during the 1930s and the other Farah strike of the 1970s in El Paso. Little is known about labor activism strategies of marginalized women in the Southwest during the period in between these two infamous labor organizing efforts. The Tex-Son strike unveils what working women did to advocate for their needs on the garment factory floor during the Cold War period, especially in a historically anti-labor, anti-union state.

Black and white image of two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son "On Strike" for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963
Two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son “On Strike” for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963 (via UTA Libraries)

The Tex-Son strike was organized by the ILGWU, affiliated for most of its existence with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and then the AFL-CIO when the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955. By the mid-1930s, most of the garment industry moved to the Southwest as the region offered a low-cost labor pool of Black and Latinx workers. This industry transition proved to be complicated for the ILGWU as the union sent Anglo men with little experience in Spanish-speaking communities to represent workers in the Southwest. Eventually, the ILGWU maintained a presence in large cities in Texas, including San Antonio.

San Antonio was home to one of the largest populations of ethnically Mexican people in the United States, which the garment industry exploited for some of the lowest wages in the country. Many working-class ethnically Mexican women in San Antonio were able to obtain positions in the defense industry during WWII, but afterwards were left with slim options besides factory jobs. Tex-Son, owned by brothers Harold and Emanuel Franzel, employed both Anglo and Mexican American women, but were actively outsourcing work to Tupelo, Mississippi where Black women made up a lucrative labor force. In response to an uptick in union membership among Tex-Son workers by the ILGWU, the Franzels produced anti-union literature and warned their workers against signing any union agreements in the fall of 1958, before the strike began. In response, the ILGWU Negotiating Committee sent demands to the Franzels which included better wages and benefits among others.

The work of Gregoria Montalbo was essential to building momentum for the strike. An organizer from Chicago, her main job was to explain to hopeful recruits about the benefits and necessity of a strike against Tex-Son. Montalbo’s role as the president of Local 180 was focused on recruitment prior to the strike as well as working to gain support from San Antonio’s clergy during the strike, appealing to the many workers who were members of Catholic congregations in the city. One of the most committed clergy supporters was Father Sherrill Smith who agreed with Local 180 that San Antonio needed unions in order to create a more equitable work environment for everyone. He played a key role on the picket line and going door to door to recruit more people to join the strike.

The Tex-Son strike was the first to use an ILGWU Chicana lead organizer, Sophie Gonzalez, who became the face of the Tex-Son strike. Gonzalez began union organizing in 1949 after her brother, a union organizer for the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butchers of America Union, encouraged her to accept a position in the ILGWU. Her presence in local newspapers and on the picket line was an integral piece of the ILGWU’s strategy. She maintained a certain physical appearance that portrayed her respectability as a woman but remained fierce in her communication of worker’s demands to the media and locals.

The very first week of the strike was the most tumultuous in terms of physical altercations between the women and allies on strike, the women who continued to work throughout the strike, and the police. On February 26th and 27th, the women on strike, angered by scab workers being escorted in and out of the factory, began throwing eggs and rocks at strike breakers and getting in physical altercations. The police charged the strikers with rioting and drunkenness, however there was not sufficient evidence to prove that any of the strikers were inebriated while on the picket lines.

Black and white image of Helen Martinez and her four children in San Antonio, Texas
Helen Martinez and her four children, San Antonio (via UTA Libraries)

The ILGWU also engaged in a propaganda campaign to accompany the strike and boycott of Tex-Son goods. This campaign exploited the dominant ideology of the time about motherhood instead of on the women’s role as economic providers. In doing so, they produced materials such as reproducing checks given to Tex-Son employees next to pictures of their children, effectively communicating the inability to care for a family on such dismal paychecks. Even children participated by handing out balloons to other children entering surrounding department stores with “Don’t Buy Tex-Son Children’s Clothes,” imprinted on them. These tactics, however, were detrimental to the image of strikers as workers, not just mothers.

In the first year of the strike, the ILGWU women gained support from other local unions, such as the International Union of Brewery Workers, and other male supporters who assisted in picket line activities. However, the daily hardships that came along with picketing wore down many of the women who originally joined the strike. Many were forced to seek out other kinds of employment, especially after being blacklisted by Tex-Son, barring them from working at other garment factories. By September 1960, ILGWU strikers began to fear that their leadership was giving up on them, which eventually came to fruition when two months later, the small benefit checks from ILGWU stopped entirely and Gonzalez and other union leaders pulled out of the strike entirely.  After appeals from people like County Commissioner Albert Peña Jr., the AFL-CIO office in Washington, D.C. agreed to continue to fund the remaining 80 women on the picket line. However, morale was already low and a few women complained that Gonzalez’s absence hurt the propaganda strategy. Others, however, complained that her leadership style and charges of opportunism hurt the strike from the very beginning. Ultimately, the strike lost its fervor due to continued violence perpetrated on the women and general distrust and lack of enthusiasm and financial support. By the end of 1962 the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio altogether. On January 24, 1963, only eleven women were left on the last day at the picket line.

Black and white image of brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes
Brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes (via UTA Libraries)

The consequences of an unsuccessful strike were clearly visible;  after the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio, unionism in the city remained practically absent. Many factories began to mock Tex-Son’s strategy of outsourcing work to the Deep South and across the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the Tex-Son strike is an important episode in the history of ethnically Mexican women’s Cold War era strategies to gaining labor rights for themselves. Blending public and private spheres by challenging the public to support their fight as mothers making ends meet for their families, the women presented locals with a new idea of women’s roles in the realm of labor. The Tex-Son strike also served as a primer of sorts for Texas Chicano Movement activism in the late 60s and early 70s that began to appeal to Chicanas’ racial and ethnic identity and oppression, rather than solely on gender identity and motherhood.

In addition to the historical importance, the strike also connects with current issues such as the recent Mississippi ICE raids at a poultry processing plant. Many observers suggest that the workers were targeted specifically because they successfully unionized and won a law suit against Koch Foods for $3.75 million over sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latinx workers. Although there are obvious differences between these two events, there are some salient congruencies. Both involved gendered discrimination and discrimination based on race and ethnicity. More obvious though, is the constant threats of violence that Latinx workers face then and today and their vulnerable position in exploitative labor relations. The Tex-Son strike and the unionization of the Mississippi poultry plant both ended in victory and defeat causing families to be uprooted and the loss of important sources of income. The immigrants detained by ICE are facing some of the most horrid conditions in detention and the women of the Tex-Son strike were beaten and chastised on the picket line. As different as the consequences of each are, the women involved share unsatisfactory and even dangerous work conditions alongside gender, ethnic, and national origin discrimination.

Sixty years after the beginning of the Tex-Son strike, Latinx people in the U.S. are still a major source of cheap labor and a punching bag for anti-union and anti-immigrant sentiments. Fortunately, strong labor activist roots for Latinx peoples of all nationalities and races still remain at the core of obtaining equitable working conditions. The Tex-Son strike of 1959, among others throughout the hemisphere, should be remembered as a foundation and lesson for labor activists today as anti-immigrant rhetoric is spewed from the highest bodies of government here and abroad.

This article draws on the following sources:

Lori Flores, “An Unladylike Strike Fashionably Clothed: Mexicana and Anglo Women Garment Workers Against Tex-Son, 1959-1963. Pacific Historical Review. 78, no. 3 (August 2009), 367-402.

Irene Ledesma, “Texas Newspapers and Chicana Workers’ Activism, 1919-1974. Western Historical Quarterly, 27, no. 3 (1995), 309-331

Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. 10th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

More from Micaela Valadez:

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)
Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010)

Related Articles:

Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical
Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century
Textbooks, Texas, and Discontent: The Fight against Inadequate Educational Resources

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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