‘What is this word economy?’ Petty Prue asked.
‘It means everything we do at work and trade. For example, the most interesting thing I’ve seen at Lakeview, and let me tell you, this is an impressive plantation and you’re impressive people … No, you guess what’s been most interesting.’
The Cobbs guessed that it was their manufactured lake where none had been before, their multipurpose mill, perhaps the girdling of the trees and letting them stand in the midst of the cotton. ‘No,’ Carmody said, ‘it’s that slave Trajan. He runs your mill, you know. Gin, press, grist, saw, he does it all. Frankly, he’s a better mechanic than any I saw in Iowa. And you must have in these fields around Jefferson …’ He threw his arms wide to include all this part of Texas. He had become so excited that he lost his line of reasoning; ideas cascaded through his mind with such rapidity that this sometimes happened.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘is that Great Raft I saw at Shreveport, is it there forever?’ When the Cobbs assured him that it was, he said: ‘Remarkable. But then, a great deal in this part of the world is remarkable.’
For two more days he talked with the Cobbs, and on the evening before his departure Reuben said: ‘You know so much about us, I’d like to hire you as manager,’ and Carmody replied: ‘You’ve almost convinced me that plantation life can work,’ and Somerset asked: ‘But you leave here still unconvinced?’ and he said: ‘Yes. This way of life is doomed. Its economy must deteriorate.’
‘Now, that’s where you’re wrong!’ Reuben cried, leaping to his feet. ‘If we can keep moving our slaves westward, we can maintain the paradise forever.’
Carmody stiffened, visibly, and Petty Prue wished her husband had not spoken so openly, for she knew the young visitor must respond; he was the kind who did: ‘Mr. Cobb, the nation will not permit you, will never permit you, to carry your slaves even ten miles west of Texas.’
Reuben flushed and his neck muscles grew taut, whereupon Petty Prue said blithely: ‘I’ve prepared a small libation in honor of your departure, Mr. Carmody,’ and the tempest was avoided, but just before retiring for the night Carmody said something which caused Reuben to fall silent: ‘Up on the Red River, I met this Methodist preacher, man named Hutchinson, not a very good preacher, if you ask me, in the pulpit I mean, but a man of profound wisdom. He told me that he’s been teaching slaves in that district to read and figure, and he’s found that some of them were distinctly clever.’
On the day that Elmer Carmody left Jefferson, Reuben Cobb and two neighbors rode north to the Red River, a distance of only sixty miles to the Indian Territory, and there they made quiet inquiry as to the comings and goings of this Methodist minister Hutchinson. When they had him well spotted, they enlisted the aid of several local plantation owners, and in the dark of night they apprehended the lanky, weepy-eyed man and tied him to a tree. Warning him that if he continued preaching insurrection to slaves in the district, they would kill him next time, they then lashed him till he fainted. Leaving him tied to the tree, they returned to their homes.
Just before Christmas 1850, the Cobbs met General Yancey Quimper, and were at first impressed by the man’s bearing and his obvious patriotism, although they differed as to the amount of support they wished to give him. Reuben, always on the hair trigger where Southern rights were concerned and looking far forward in his defense of slavery, thought that Quimper made a great deal of sense in his opposition to Henry Clay’s notorious Compromise of 1850, which restricted the spread of slavery, and he supported Quimper with special vigor when the general objected to the part of the compromise which delineated the boundaries of Texas.
‘Look at this map, what they did to us,’ Quimper cried as he explained how Congress had stolen immense areas of land from what should have been Texas. ‘We won all this territory from Mexico, won it with our guns.’
‘Is it true that you led the infantry at San Jacinto?’ Somerset asked.
‘Most powerful sixteen minutes in the history of Texas,’ Quimper said. ‘In those flaming minutes we won all this land, and now Congress takes it away.’
His map was compelling, for it showed the original Republic of Texas in 1836, bordered on the west by the Rio Grande in such a way that Santa Fe was part of Texas, and there was also a panhandle which stretched all the way into what would later become the states of Colorado and Wyoming, encompassing much of the good land of New Mexico and Oklahoma. ‘If we’d of kept this,’ Quimper stormed, ‘we’d of been one of the major nations of the world.’
Somerset tried to placate him: ‘General, you forget that Congress paid us ten million dollars for our rights.’
‘No honest Texian would ever sell his birthright for a mess of potatoes.’
‘We call ourselves Texans now. The old days are gone.’
‘Ah-ha!’ Reuben cried. ‘Did you hear that, General? First time my cousin used we when speakin’ of Texas. Always before it was you, like he was a visitor here.’
‘I feel myself to be part of Texas,’ Sett confessed, ‘and while I can’t see the other states allowing us to hold all that land, especially up in the North, I do think we ought to have had the upper reaches of the Rio Grande as our western boundary.’
‘Exactly!’ Quimper shouted. ‘Then we’d have Santa Fe as a counterbalance to El Paso.’ With a broad and generous hand he gave away Colorado and Wyoming, but with hungry fingers he drew Santa Fe back into the Texas orbit.
The cousins were at first charmed by this affable man with the very attractive wife. The general was now thirty-eight years old, fleshy, clean-shaven, and often prophetic when peering into the future: ‘Worst mistake Texas ever made, gentlemen, was when we sent Sam Houston to the United States Senate. Hell, he don’t represent the interests of true Texans or the future of the South.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Somerset interrupted. ‘I’ve seen pamphlets in which you and Houston fought side by side in getting Texas into the Union.’
‘We did, that we did. Even a habitual drunk can sober up sometimes and do the right thing. But he’s a man who cannot be trusted, never could be.’
Reuben said: ‘They tell me you had a chance to shoot him in that duel, and that as a gentleman, you shot off to the side.’
‘Worst mistake I ever made. Sooner or later, somebody’s goin’ to have to handle that old drunk.’
When Quimper left Lakeview, the Cobb cousins remained confused because so much of what he said was true, so much of what he did was false, and it was during these days of review that Reuben and Sett began to draw apart in their judgment of the man. Reuben, always thirsting for action, was eager to associate himself with Quimper and was uneasy lest the tall-talker initiate some campaign without including him, but Sett, a cautious judge of men, grew more suspicious of Quimper the more he thought about the man’s behavior. In this he was abetted by Millicent, who said simply, when they were alone: ‘He’s a fraud. Couldn’t you see that?’
‘I did see it, but I also saw that he makes great sense when he talks about South and North.’
‘Easy. Listen to him when he talks, but leave him when he begins to act.’
In 1854, Yancey Quimper rode back to Jefferson with a band of nineteen Southern patriots who were determined to move Kansas into the slave column, and he was not only prepared to march them right into that area but also to help them in disciplining any Northerners who might have slipped across the border. He was so excited, so persuasive, that Reuben Cobb rode north with him.
They entered Kansas quietly, in three separate groups, and spent two weeks listening to accounts of Northern perfidy. For fifteen days they did nothing except scout the land and establish escape routes in case a superior Northern force attacked. Of course, at this time there was no Northern force, superior or inferior, but they did come upon a pair of isolated farms occupied by families from Illinois, and these they surrounded and attacked on their last night in the area.
‘No killin’!’ Quimper ordered as his men crept closer, and his command was
obeyed, for the Texans ran at the houses shouting and yelling, and so swift were they in executing Quimper’s commands, they had possession of the farms before the occupants could think of gunfire. The families were herded onto a hillside, where they watched as torches were applied to the rude homes they had built with painful effort.
‘You go back where you belong,’ Quimper warned them. ‘Your kind is not welcome here.’
When the vigilantes returned across the Red River, recognized by Congress as the northern boundary of Texas, they learned that Reverend Hutchinson, the Methodist minister who had been punished before because of his incendiary work among slaves, was still up to his old tricks, so Quimper, Cobb and three others rode out to his parsonage and hanged him.
The group then separated, Cobb heading east to Jefferson and Quimper south to Xavier, but each carried a promise from the other: ‘When the trouble starts, you can rely on me.’
When Elmer Carmody published his travel book, Texas Good and Bad, he could not have foreseen that his carefully considered judgment on two types of Texas community, English and German, would place the residents of the latter in mortal danger. First, his generalizations about the typical Texas town of that period:
South of the Brazos, I stopped overnight at the hostelry of one Mr. Angeny, from parts unknown. He had four guests that night, but explained to us: ‘I ain’t got no food in the place, saven some cornbread and lard and sugar.’ That’s what we ate. He had no blankets, either, and his two beds in which four of us would sleep with all our clothes on for warmth were lice-ridden. He also had no hot water for shaving, no chamberpot for convenience, and very little hay for our horses. Charge, $1.50 for man, $.85 for beast.
In this frame of mind Carmody chanced to move west from Austin, which he considered a pitiful excuse for a state capital, ‘worst in America, all spittoons and greasy beef,’ and in his casual wandering he came upon Fredericksburg, which he extolled:
It was with these gloomy reflections that I turned a bend in the Pedernales River and came upon the two beautiful stone houses of the Allerkamp family, and immediately I saw them, I realized that I was passing from barbarism into civilization.
The trees were trimmed, as trees should be when they stand about homes. The lawn was green, and flowers were confined to neat beds upon which someone had spent considerable care. The well-designed houses were of stone, with no open spaces for the wind to enter, which I had been accustomed to on my Texas travels. And over everything there was a cloak of neatness, of respectability, of the very best husbandry.
As a practiced writer, Carmody realized that for an outsider to venture into a sensitive area like Texas and offer comment on its way of life was hazardous and bound to excite criticism, but even he did not appreciate how inflammatory it was to compare the Germans so favorably to the barbarians he encountered elsewhere. Especially dangerous were his comments about white cotton growers:
I had been assured since entering Texas that the cultivation of cotton could be achieved only with the work of slaves and that no white man could possibly plant and harvest this demanding plant. I saw that the Germans of the hill country did very well with cotton. They grow it efficiently, bale it more carefully than others, then watch it bring a marked premium at Galveston, New Orleans and Liverpool. Fredericksburg proves that most of what Texans say about slavery is nonsense.
A writer has certain advantages. He can publish such evaluations, then scurry out of the country, but his words remain behind, generating bitterness, and in the years following the circulation of Carmody’s Texas Good and Bad, other Texas citizens began to look upon the Germans as aliens who refused to enter the mainstream of Texas life, as cryptic abolitionists, and even as traitors to the fundamental patriotism of the state.
When General Quimper visited the Cobbs, he found them incensed at what Carmody had written about them, but they had not finished voicing their grievances when he interrupted: ‘Gentlemen, it isn’t only his infringement of your courtesy that should bother you. What can you expect of a writer? It’s his praising of the Germans. And particularly what he says about slavery.’
He took the Carmody book and read with emphasis the passage about growing cotton without slaves: ‘That’s treasonous! The time could come when we might have to teach those Germans a lesson in manners. They invade our land and then try to tell us how to behave. If we catch them tamperin’ with our slaves …’
He had touched upon one of the strangest aspects of Southern life: many slaveholders were convinced that their slaves, at least, were supremely happy in their position of servitude; but at the same time, the owners were desperately afraid of slave uprisings, or of Northerners inciting their slaves; there was a constant tattoo of hangings, beatings and terrible repressions whenever it was suspected that the ‘happy’ slaves might be surreptitiously preparing a general slaughter. Thus there had been fierce punishments meted out when it looked as if the slaves might rebel at Nacogdoches, and white clergymen had been hanged at the Red River on the mere suspicion that they had been ‘tamperin’ with our loyal slaves.’
Any serious consideration of punishing the insidious Germans was forgotten in early June of 1856, when word reached Texas of the insane behavior of John Brown and his sons in Kansas.
‘They’ve murdered Southerners!’ General Quimper cried as he carried the news from house to house, and before the details could be verified, Quimper and Reuben Cobb were back on the trail to Bleeding Kansas. With the nineteen men who accompanied them, they formed a powerful support for the Southern agents who were trying to ensure that if a plebiscite ever occurred, the vote would favor slavery. Of these twenty-one vigorous defenders of the Southern position, only four owned slaves—Quimper was not one of them—and only thirteen had come into Texas from Southern states, but all were willing to risk their lives in defense of the South. As Quimper himself explained, after a wild skirmish in which four abolitionists were slain: ‘You have a strong feelin’ that God intended things to be the way they are in the South. And any man can see that the welfare of Texas depends on our standin’ shoulder to shoulder with our Southern brothers.’
When Cobb and Quimper reached home with the exciting news of their victories in Kansas—‘Nine abolitionists killed without the loss of a Texan’—they started to try to whip up enthusiasm for some kind of vague action against the Union, but now they ran into the iron-hard character of Sam Houston, who was determined to protect the Union and keep his beloved Texas firmly within its protection.
Quimper, an able man where political savagery was required, led the fight to humiliate the ‘old drunk,’ as he still called him: ‘He sits there in the Senate of the United States and does everything possible to humiliate Texas. Always he votes against our interests. He might as well be an abolitionist.’
His charges were partially true, because in these closing days of his life Sam Houston, now sixty-four, dropped the vacillation which had sometimes clouded his character and came out strongly and heroically in favor of preserving the Union, regardless of the offense to local preferences: ‘I support the Union which has made us great, and if there are any temporary imbalances, they can be corrected.’ When pressed, he admitted that he was now and had always been a strong pro-slavery man, but that slavery could be protected and even advanced within the existing structure, and he begged his fellow Texans to protect it in that constitutional manner.
In a time of threatening chaos, he was a constant voice of reason, and when others talked with increasing passion he became more conciliatory, imploring his friends, North and South, to retain the rule of common sense. When he had felt that to preserve the Union he must vote for the Compromise of 1850, because he saw it as the only way to prevent dissolution, he had been denounced as a traitor to the Southern cause, and when he spoke even more forcefully against the shameful surrender of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, he was vilified.
It was as a consequence of this general disfavor into which Houston had fallen that General Quimper devis
ed a clever manipulation to show Houston and the rest of the state just how deeply Texas now despised its former hero. ‘Let’s show the old fool we mean business,’ Quimper argued. ‘Let’s elect his replacement in the Senate right now.’
‘His term has two more years to run. Such a rebuke has never before been given.’
‘We’ll do it, and he’ll be the laughingstock of the nation.’ And forthwith Quimper bullied his fellow Texas state senators into designating Houston’s replacement while he was still in office.
But Houston was a fighter, and in 1859 he astounded Quimper and his cronies by announcing that since he was being denied his Senate seat, he would run for the governorship of Texas on a platform of preserving the Union. Aware that sentiment was veering against him on this point, he mounted an intensely personal campaign, crisscrossing the state and applying his unusual powers of persuasion. People swarmed to meet with him, listened, rejected his program but supported him personally. Some felt that the old Indian-lover could solve the Indian problems that agitated the western counties, and when the votes were counted, this man who swam against the tide had won, capping a career unmatched in American history: congressman from Tennessee, twice elected governor of that state, twice president of the Republic of Texas, United States senator, and now governor of the state of Texas. He had known more ups and downs than any other major figure in American politics, for after almost every victory, there had come defeat. Now, with the Union in peril, he would launch a heroic defense of his principles.