Edmund J. Davis of Texas

Edmund J. Davis of Texas PDF Author: Carl H. Moneyhon
Publisher: Texas Christian University Press
ISBN: 9780875654058
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Volume two of The Texas Biography Series reveals Edmund J. Davis, the heroic man who stood in strong opposition to his peers and better reflected the ideals of the nation than those of so many of his contemporaries. Carl H. Moneyhon presents a long overdue favorable account of a man who was determined to make progressive changes and stand in stark opposition to the state’s political elite. What moved this man to take such a dramatic stand against his political peers? Moneyhon strives to answer this very question. Edmund J. Davis was not only a part of the political elite during the Civil War, but he also opposed secession. He refused to follow most of Texas’ leaders and actively opposed the Confederacy by attempting to bring Texas back to the Union. After the war, Davis was a leader in reconstructing the state based on true free labor and pursued progressive and egalitarian policies as governor of Texas. Through the entire reconstruction process Davis faced extreme Confederate hostility. After leaving the governor’s mansion an unpopular man and politician, he still remained dedicated to changing Texas. He worked to change his adopted state until the day he died.

Edmund J. Davis of Texas

Edmund J. Davis of Texas PDF Author: Carl H. Moneyhon
Publisher: Texas Christian University Press
ISBN: 9780875654058
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Volume two of The Texas Biography Series reveals Edmund J. Davis, the heroic man who stood in strong opposition to his peers and better reflected the ideals of the nation than those of so many of his contemporaries. Carl H. Moneyhon presents a long overdue favorable account of a man who was determined to make progressive changes and stand in stark opposition to the state’s political elite. What moved this man to take such a dramatic stand against his political peers? Moneyhon strives to answer this very question. Edmund J. Davis was not only a part of the political elite during the Civil War, but he also opposed secession. He refused to follow most of Texas’ leaders and actively opposed the Confederacy by attempting to bring Texas back to the Union. After the war, Davis was a leader in reconstructing the state based on true free labor and pursued progressive and egalitarian policies as governor of Texas. Through the entire reconstruction process Davis faced extreme Confederate hostility. After leaving the governor’s mansion an unpopular man and politician, he still remained dedicated to changing Texas. He worked to change his adopted state until the day he died.

Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor

Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor PDF Author: Kenneth W. Howell
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781603440400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Of the 174 delegates to the Texas convention on secession in 1861, only 8 voted against the motion to secede. James Webb Throckmorton of McKinney was one of them. Yet upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate Army and fought in a number of campaigns. At war’s end, his centrist position as a conservative Unionist ultimately won him election as governor. Still, his refusal to support the Fourteenth Amendment or to protect aggressively the rights and physical welfare of the freed slaves led to clashes with military officials and his removal from office in 1867. Throckmorton’s experiences reveal much about southern society and highlight the complexities of politics in Texas during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Because his life spans one of the most turbulent periods in Texas politics, Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor, the first book on Throckmorton in nearly seventy years, will provide new insights for anyone interested in the Antebellum era, the Civil War, and the troubled years of Reconstruction.

Still the Arena of Civil War

Still the Arena of Civil War PDF Author: Kenneth Wayne Howell
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574414496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
Following the Civil War, the United States was fully engaged in a bloody conflict with ex-Confederates, conservative Democrats, and members of organized terrorist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, for control of the southern states. Texas became one of the earliest battleground states in the War of Reconstruction. Was the Reconstruction era in the Lone Star State simply a continuation of the Civil War? Evidence presented by sixteen contributors in this new anthology, edited by Kenneth W. Howell, argues that this indeed was the case. Topics include the role of the Freedmen's Bureau and the occ.

Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor

Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor PDF Author: Kenneth Wayne Howell
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 160344405X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Of the 174 delegates to the Texas convention on secession in 1861, only 8 voted against the motion to secede. James Webb Throckmorton of McKinney was one of them. Yet upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate Army and fought in a number of campaigns. At war?s end, his centrist position as a conservative Unionist ultimately won him election as governor. Still, his refusal to support the Fourteenth Amendment or to protect aggressively the rights and physical welfare of the freed slaves led to clashes with military officials and his removal from office in 1867. Throckmorton?s experiences reveal much about southern society and highlight the complexities of politics in Texas during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Because his life spans one of the most turbulent periods in Texas politics, Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor, the first book on Throckmorton in nearly seventy years, will provide new insights for anyone interested in the Antebellum era, the Civil War, and the troubled years of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction in Texas

Reconstruction in Texas PDF Author: Charles William Ramsdell
Publisher: Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
Presents an outline of a period in Texas history that has left a deep impress upon the later history, the political organization and the public mind of Texans.

The Seventh Star of the Confederacy

The Seventh Star of the Confederacy PDF Author: Kenneth Wayne Howell
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574412590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
On February 1, 1861, delegates at the Texas Secession Convention elected to leave the Union. The people of Texas supported the actions of the convention in a statewide referendum, paving the way for the state to secede and to officially become the seventh state in the Confederacy. Soon the Texans found themselves engaged in a bloody and prolonged civil war against their northern brethren. During the curse of this war, the lives of thousands of Texans, both young and old, were changed forever. This new anthology, edited by Kenneth W. Howell, incorporates the latest scholarly research on how Texans experienced the war. Eighteen contributors take us from the battlefront to the home front, ranging from inside the walls of a Confederate prison to inside the homes of women and children left to fend for themselves while their husbands and fathers were away on distant battlefields, and from the halls of the governor’s mansion to the halls of the county commissioner’s court in Colorado County. Also explored are well-known battles that took place in or near Texas, such as the Battle of Galveston, the Battle of Nueces, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the Red River Campaign. Finally, the social and cultural aspects of the war receive new analysis, including the experiences of women, African Americans, Union prisoners of war, and noncombatants.

The Feud That Wasn’t

The Feud That Wasn’t PDF Author: James M. Smallwood
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781603440172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Marauding outlaws, or violent rebels still bent on fighting the Civil War? For decades, the so-called “Taylor-Sutton feud” has been seen as a bloody vendetta between two opposing gangs of Texas gunfighters. However, historian James M. Smallwood here shows that what seemed to be random lawlessness can be interpreted as a pattern of rebellion by a loose confederation of desperadoes who found common cause in their hatred of the Reconstruction government in Texas. Between the 1850s and 1880, almost 200 men rode at one time or another with Creed Taylor and his family through a forty-five-county area of Texas, stealing and killing almost at will, despite heated and often violent opposition from pro-Union law enforcement officials, often led by William Sutton. From 1871 until his eventual arrest, notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin served as enforcer for the Taylors. In 1874 in the streets of Comanche, Texas, on his twenty-first birthday, Hardin and two other members of the Taylor ring gunned down Brown County Deputy Charlie Webb. This cold-blooded killing—one among many—marked the beginning of the end for the Taylor ring, and Hardin eventually went to the penitentiary as a result. The Feud That Wasn’t reinforces the interpretation that Reconstruction was actually just a continuation of the Civil War in another guise, a thesis Smallwood has advanced in other books and articles. He chronicles in vivid detail the cattle rustling, horse thieving, killing sprees, and attacks on law officials perpetrated by the loosely knit Taylor ring, drawing a composite picture of a group of anti-Reconstruction hoodlums who at various times banded together for criminal purposes. Western historians and those interested in gunfighters and lawmen will heartily enjoy this colorful and meticulously researched narrative.

Identified with Texas

Identified with Texas PDF Author: Elizabeth Whitlow
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574418777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Identified with Texas is the first published biography of Texas Governor Elisha Marshall Pease (1812-1883), presented by historian Elizabeth Whitlow as a dual biography of Pease and his wife, Lucadia Niles Pease (1813-1905). Born in Connecticut in 1812, E. M. Pease came to Texas in 1835, where he became, in his own words, “identified with Texas.” Pease volunteered to fight in the first battle of the Revolution at Gonzales, and he served with the Texan Army at the Siege of Bexar. Afterward, his career in public service began as a clerk at the Convention of 1836, and the first draft of the Republic’s Constitution is in his handwriting. Pease served in the first three state legislatures after Texas joined the Union in 1845, was elected governor in 1853 and re-elected in 1855, and returned to the governorship as an interim appointee from 1867 to 1869 during Reconstruction. His achievements in all these positions were substantial. Pease was also a highly successful and respected lawyer and a large landholder with properties in Travis and many other Texas counties. He owned slaves, but he did not take a strong proslavery position, and when secession came in 1861, he continued to support the Union. He and his family remained in Austin during the Civil War, and when it ended, he did his best to heal wounds and restore Texas to the United States in a second appointment as governor. Lucadia Niles Pease married Marshall Pease in 1850 and came to Texas as a newlywed. She was known as the Governor’s “Lady.” Moreover, her early, independent travel and her stated position as a “woman’s rights woman” in the 1850s, as well as her support for sending a daughter away to college in the 1870s to earn a degree, all serve as markers of her intelligence and the strength of her convictions. To tell their story, Whitlow mined thousands of letters and papers saved by the Pease family and housed in the Austin History Center of the Austin Public Library, as well as in the Governor’s Papers at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. E. M. Pease observed near the end of his life that he had been “one of the people of Texas since the colonial days of Stephen F. Austin.” He and Lucadia left an extraordinary historical record that documents the development of Texas.

The Shattering of Texas Unionism

The Shattering of Texas Unionism PDF Author: Dale Baum
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807122457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
In a rare departure from the narrow periodization that marks past studies of Texas politics during the Civil War era, this sweeping work tracks the leadership and electoral basis of politics in the Lone Star State from secession all the way through Reconstruction. Employing a combination of traditional historical sources and cutting-edge quantitative analyses of county voting returns, Dale Baum painstakingly explores the double collapse of Texas unionism—first as a bulwark against secession in the winter of 1860–1861 and then in the late 1860s as a foundation upon which to build a truly biracial society. By carefully tracing the shifting alliances of voters from one election to the next, Baum charts the dramatic assemblage and subsequent breakup of Sam Houston’s coalition on the eve of the war, evaluates the social and economic bases of voting in the secession referendum, and appraises the extent to which intimidation of anti-secessionists shaped the state’s decision to leave the Union. He also examines the ensuing voting behavior of Confederate Texans and shows precisely how antebellum alignments and issues carried over into the war years. Finally, he describes the impact on the state’s electoral politics brought about by the policies of President Andrew Johnson and by broad programs of revolutionary change under Congressional Reconstruction. Baum presents the most sophisticated examination yet of white voter disfranchisement and apathy under Congressional Reconstruction and of the social and political origins of the state’s Radical Republican “scalawag” constituency. He also provides a rigorous statistical investigation of one of the most controversial elections ever held in Texas—the 1869 governor’s race, lost by conservative Republican Andrew Jackson Hamilton to Radical Edmund J. Davis, which nonetheless effectively ended Congressional Reconstruction. Through his innovative exploration of unionist sentiment in Texas, Baum illuminates the most turbulent political period in the history of the state, interpreting both the weight of continuity and the force of change that swept over it before, during, and immediately after the American Civil War. Students of the South, the Civil War, and African American history, as well as sociologists and political scientists interested in election fraud, political violence, and racial strife, will benefit from this significant volume.

Red River Valley

Red River Valley PDF Author: Patrick G. Williams
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603444890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Though Lyndon Johnson developed a reputation as a rough-hewn, arm-twisting deal-maker with a drawl, at a crucial moment in history he delivered an address to Congress that moved Martin Luther King Jr. to tears and earned praise from the media as the best presidential speech in American history. Even today, his voting rights address of 1965 ranks high not only in political significance, but also as an example of leadership through oratory.