"My own louts": A note on an ancestor during The Late Unpleasantness

An 1862 depiction of an incident from a sequence of events known as the Great Gainesville (Texas) Hanging. Click on the image to enlarge. During the latter half of 1862, more than 50 men were tried and hanged, lynched, or assassinated in Gainesville, Denton, and other north Texas towns; some of them were suspected of being Union sympathizers; some had signed a petition protesting the Confederacy's 1862 conscription order; some were Confederate loyalists killed in acts of reprisal. Most of these men were guilty of nothing more than speaking their minds; some, not even of that much. This series of events "may have been the largest single outbreak of vigilante violence in the history of the United States." Image (and information on this event) from here; the whole online exhibition, Under the Rebel Flag: Life in Texas During the Civil War, is well worth your time, especially if you're a Texan.

As a boy I was, it's safe to say, obsessed with the Civil War. In elementary school, I could (and did, a few times) write an accurate report on the life of Robert E. Lee almost from memory; when I was in junior high school, I almost finished reading all four volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Lee; I read everything on the war that was in my elementary school's library; the image of General John Bell Hood, missing an arm and a leg but still leading his men into battle while strapped to his horse, then and now strikes me as something like a succinct summation of the crazed valor of the South (though, as I've gotten older, that adjective gains more and more weight at the expense of the noun). In thinking back over that time, I don't recall dwelling much if at all on the causes or consequences of the war. But I didn't think the North was evil or anything like that; I just found the South more interesting. Meanwhile, my father's side of my family was historically, staunchly Republican--so much so that my mother's brother once joked that in 1964, our car was the only one in Austin, Texas, with a Goldwater bumper sticker on it. That may not be much of an exaggeration, actually.

I have also known since childhood that my father's family's Republican leanings stretched back to my great-great-grandfather, whose first and middle names were John Lawrence. After the Civil War, he hosted meetings of the Republican Party in his place of business (whose building still stands on Sixth Street in Austin) until with the end of Reconstruction, it was said, he and his family felt compelled to move out of the city. I don't know the exact nature of the "feeling compelled." Given the vehemence with which the citizenry reviled the Republican Reconstruction-era governors (in particular Edmund Davis, who rewarded John Lawrence with an appointment as alderman in Austin)--so much so that Texas' post-Reconstruction constitution renders its governors the 2nd-weakest of the 50 states--I can imagine that implied violence may very well have been part of the equation. At the very least, his business probably suffered during that time.

However, and a bit confusingly, I have also known since childhood that John Lawrence enlisted in a Confederate artillery battery at the outset of the War. As nearly as I can tell, this unit never saw action; its purpose may have been to defend Austin from potential Union attack or, perhaps, lend support to frontier units defending against Indian raids and general lawlessness. (Texas' need for men to serve that function created tension between it and the Confederate government.) I feel certain (or, to be more honest, I hope) that my great-great-grandfather's sympathies lay more with Central Texas' German immigrant population's substantial resistance to secession (though himself Norwegian, his wife was German, and his sons married into German families (what other Lutherans in Austin were there, after all?)), that his enlisting was at best done out of his love of Austin rather than a love of secession. There's also the less-happy possibility, of course, that he enlisted as a go-along-to-get-along gesture.

I am proud of what I know of John Lawrence, but what I know is, really, very little. I know a few facts. I do not know his heart. For all I know, his alliance with the Republicans after the war may also have been a go-along-to-get-along gesture, though a quick read of Davis' biography (he himself was a Southern Unionist) suggests to me that Davis, a man with few friends in Austin, would have seen through most such gestures. Besides: Seeing as it was the cool thing in Austin to hate the provisional governments, John Lawrence would have gained more by not cozying up with the Republicans.

But back to his enlisting in that artillery battery at the outbreak of the war. After running across something this morning, I'm willing to add a third possible motive for doing so: fear of reprisal if he didn't somehow demonstrate his loyalty to secession.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I often nod affirmatively in Ta-Nehisi Coates' direction. Last year, he and his readers undertook a discussion of James McPherson's single-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom; during that discussion, Coates was struck by the pervasiveness of the incontrovertible historical record showing that, for the seceding states, its publicly-stated reasons for leaving the Union really did all come down to defending and preserving slavery--that even the stated rationale behind the "states' rights" argument was asserting the right to continue to practice slavery and oppose the national government's attempts to implement policies that the southern states saw as indirect attacks on slavery. Anyway, out of that discussion Coates has, in various contexts, facilitated a recurring discussion of various documents from the years leading up to secession, and it has made for fascinating, even revelatory reading.

This morning, I ran across one of those posts that I hadn't seen before: a May 1861 letter written to a Mr. A. Newman by the Committee of Safety in the Texas county where Newman resides, which states that, because he has been reported to "have expressed abolition sentiments before truthful and trust-worthy citizens living in our midst and [. . .] the present crisis will admit of no such expressions," Texas having seceded on March 2 of that year, Newman and his family have 30 days to leave the state, "Else you will be dealt with according to Mob law." (emphasis in the original). The letter concludes with this threat: "[S]hould you heedlessly disregard the above warning, your friends if you have any, will deeply regret your folly."

I wish I knew where exactly this letter was written, but in the larger scheme of things the particulars don't matter, especially in a state-wide atmosphere, stirred up by Lincoln's election, of mistrust and suspicions, rumors of slave revolts, and shootings between pro- and anti-slavery sympathizers akin to those in mid-1850s Kansas. This was a political environment so poisonous that even Sam Houston, the man who defeated the Mexican army to win Texas' independence and served as the Republic of Texas' first president--in other words, a man as close to a god-come-to-earth as Texas is ever likely to have--was forced out as governor when he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy. In such an environment, lesser figures in the South who opposed secession had few options--my great-great-grandfather, and perhaps some of your ancestors, too, included.

So, no, as a result of all this, I am no closer to knowing John Lawrence's reasoning for the choices he made during the 1860s and '70s. But, seeing as how, before this morning, I had not known much of what you've read here, I have a much greater appreciation for the world he had to live in. It was a dangerous place for someone even to be rumored to have anti-secessionist inclinations--the state could not and/or would not protect such people (during the Great Gainesville Hanging, 14 already-jailed people were taken from jail and lynched because other people got frustrated by the slow pace of the trials to make official the foregone conclusion of those jailed people's guilt. Assuming my great-great-grandfather was a Unionist, as I think was indeed the case, he had, basically, two "noble" choices and some other ones requiring him, to a greater or lesser extent, to check his conscience at the door. He could actively resist the secessionists and risk death, or leave for Mexico or Union-held territory--those were the noble ones. He appears to have chosen neither of them.

I'll be honest: I don't know how I feel about that. The easy thing to say would be that he should have acted on principle--but that's easy to say not for reasons of living in our relatively more enlightened times but because I have the advantage of hindsight and, frankly, the luxury of my choice's being one that does not potentially put at risk my life or that of my family. Many, many people with far less to risk have chosen far more poorly than he appears to have. One thing I do know I feel, though, is that John Lawrence now feels a little less legendary and a little more human to me. As we move through the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, I hope that knowing a bit more about his world makes me more thoughtful about it.

Read More...

Summary only...

More on "my own louts": A rifle as a Texas madeleine

Some of you may recall that I posted on my father's brother's unexpected death. There had been a bit of unfinished business regarding his possessions; and so on my recent trip to Texas, my brother and I drove over to Houston to collect those things and, if possible, figure out what to do with them. I've recently found out a little more about one of these objects that, in conjunction with my recent reading of John Graves' Goodbye to a River, has me thinking about the history of the place where I grew up and, as Graves so eloquently puts it in his book, "my own louts."

Among those possessions are two shotguns and a rifle. The shotguns, according to a friend of mine who also buys and sells older guns, aren't anything special--he agrees with my calling them "varmint killers"--but the rifle is a Winchester made in 1903. It's been in thinking about this rifle over the past couple of days that I've been filled with a flood of family and community memory.

Some boring reminiscing follows, below the fold.



Since my grandfather was born in 1907, I'm thinking (though I have no proof) that the Winchester originally belonged to his father. I can't say for sure because, to be honest, if I had ever seen these guns before, I have no memory of them now, and I remember no talk about them. I knew Grandpa had guns, though, because we'd hear the occasional story about his having to shoot raccoons or, on occasion, coatis that were getting into the hen house. But aside from my dad's occasional coon hunts with high school friends of his, we weren't hunters. But the rifle. That takes me back to a time when Oak Hill wasn't on the frontier, but it was still pretty wild: the last black bear in the area, people said, had been shot only in 1900; and if one reads between the lines of this article on Oak Hill, one can see that it was pretty rough around the edges, too (really: ask yourself what a place must be like that has 70 people and 4 saloons; something else it doesn't tell you is that that limestone for the state capital was quarried out of one of the hills by prison labor--hence the name Convict Hill, given to that hill), and would be for much of its first century.

(Case in point: When my dad was a boy (this would have been in the mid-to-late '40s), after school let out the kids would have rock fights between the "clean" kids and the "dirty" kids. The "clean" kids were the ones who bathed more than once a week.

My daddy was a "clean" kid, I'll have you know.)

Oak Hill was just becoming a more-or-less respectable place to be from when I was a boy growing up in the '60s. Most of the kids I went to elementary school with were like me: not farmers, but a generation removed from that life and never to return to it, and often living on land that had been in the family for a generation or (in my case) three. But the son of the man who shot that last bear was a friend of our family, as his father had been (their property adjoined each other), and I was growing up on land with dense stands of "cedar" trees (which are really junipers) and had deer and fox and the occasional bobcat, while across the road was another thousand acres where, somewhere down in a limestone canyon, a mountain lion lived. You get the idea: combine undeveloped land held for generations, a family who loved to tell stories about people whose relatives at least were still alive, and one boy who loved running around in those woods and possessed of an overactive imagination, and you have someone who, when he first read certain passages in Faulkner, understood them at a subconscious level before he could have told you in an articulate fashion what Faulkner was actually saying.

I'm going on and on about all this because that Oak Hill is gone except in memory. Forty years ago, my family thought people were nuts for building a subdivision west of us; today, all those hills, all the way out to Dripping Springs, 30 miles away, are filled with people on one- and two-acre lots enamored of Hill Country living. Driving around that part of the county can be a melancholy experience, to the point that, for a longer time than I can remember, I'd not thought much about those times before me that, when I was a boy, didn't feel all that distant. But something about hefting that rifle--no desire to shoot it, mind you, just holding it--filled me with something a lot sweeter than melancholy.

Read More...

Summary only...

"My own louts": An excerpt from John Graves' Goodbye to a River

Having grown up in Texas, and grown up hearing his name, it's hard for me to gauge how well known John Graves (b. 1920) is outside Texas. The fact that he's been nominated twice for the National Book Award, though, would suggest that he has a reputation in some circles. Anyway, while I was in Austin, the Barnes & Noble I visited happened to have a copy of the book which established Graves' reputation, Goodbye to a River; I don't think I'd ever even seen a copy of it before, so I grabbed it. It's been my bedtime reading for a few days now.

The book's plot is a simple one. In the 1950s, the government proposed a series of dams along 200 or so miles of the Brazos River south and west of Forth Worth, a stretch of river that Graves grew up along and knew well as a boy and a young man. Graves wants to see that stretch one last time, before the impounded water floods the canyons and sand bars and still-untouched stands of oak and elm, so in November of 1957 he loads up a canoe with provisions (more than he really needs--he occasionally uses Thoreau to reproach himself) and a "not very practical" six-month-old daschund and heads downstream. As he relates the incidents of travel, the changing weather and the folks he meets along the way, he also tells the stories he knows about the flora and fauna (both presently there and long gone), the bends and crossings and landmarks.

That's the plot. Here's the book's ethos in a nutshell (the ellipsis is Graves' own):

Nothing that happened in this segment, [during the time of the Comanche raids] or later, made any notable dent in human history. From one very possible point of view, the stories tell of a partly unnecessary, drawn-out squabble between savages and half-illiterate louts constituting the fringes of a culture which, two and a half centuries before, had spawned Shakespeare, and which even then was reading Dickins and Trollope and Thoreau and considering the thoughts of Charles Darwin. They tell too--the stories--of the subsequent squabbles among the louts themselves: of cattle thievery, corn whisky, Reconstruction, blood feuds, lynchings, splinter sectarianism, and further illiteracy.

Can they then have any bearing on mankind's adventures?

Maybe a little. They don't all tell of louts. There was something of a showing-through; meanings floated near the surface which have relevance to the murkier thing Americans have become. It didn't happen just on the Brazos, certainly, but all along the line of that moving brush fire. There's nothing new in the idea that the frontier had continuing impact on our character, or that one slice of that frontier, examined, may to some degree explain the whole . . .

But in truth such gravities were not what salted the tales I could read, looking off over the low country from the point atop the bluffs. Mankind is one thing; a man's self is another. What that self is tangles itself knottily with what his people were, and what they came out of. Mine came out of Texas, as did I. If those were louts, they were my own louts. (143-144)

Only three of the dams were built--due in large part, many say, to this book.

Read More...

Summary only...