Lone Star (62 page)

From these houses planters looked after their operations, almost always from a room called the "office." Here business agents were consulted, and overseers were given their orders. The "office" much more resembled a library or study than a modern business room; in fact, those Texans who possessed libraries invariably called them offices.

Not far from the main or Big House were the overseer's little house, and the slave cabins, usually in a row. There were no bars on the cabins, but occasionally bars on the kitchen of the big house, to prevent food filching by hungry blacks. The overseer sometimes ate with the planter, but never slept in the big house. House slaves worked in the kitchens and in the plantation house, but an unwritten protocol required them never to sit down while inside. Intricate codes of conduct, between slave and master, overseer and owner, and even slave and poor white, were already far advanced. Since there were codes, there was none of the social unease that frequently attended the relationship between servant and master in the North.

The traveler William Bollaert, who was familiar with the homes of the English aristocracy, left this impression of a day in the life of the leisure class at Galveston during the Republic:

About sunrise prudent and judicious people will arise, prepare their toilette, clad themselves lightly, walk or work in the gardens, then ride or bathe on the seashore. . . .

A small bell is now rung when all take their places at the breakfast table—the ladies at the top. We all appear to suffer a little langor, the air is sultry . . . we get this meal which is a most excellent dejuener [sic] a la fourchette—retire, light the gentle Havana, discuss the politics of the day . . . then those who have business attend to it. Idlers may return to their rooms, read—and these idlers and visitors read a great deal—Bulwer's last novel of Zanona is here, this is a great favorite—then, before dinner, billiards or ninepins may be played. . . .

We congregate on the Verandah—impart to each other news etc—probably take an iced mint-julep—the ice comes from U. States—a glass of Madera [sic] and bitters etc. etc. . . .

Towards 4 or 5 o'clock pairties [sic] are made to go fishing on the beach . . . or a gallop on the prairie till dark . . . it is generally a tea supper—a quiet smoke on the Verandah—long chats—then each one off to some evening party or other—but it does not require much pursuasion [sic] to sit for an hour or two in the cool of the evening, sup a mint julep—touch a guitar and sing the song most loved.

The description fits the life of almost any landed leisure class, from the country houses of England to the
haciendas
of Mexico or Peru. Some historians have claimed that this manner of life was well on its way to giving birth to a genuine indigenous culture. This is doubtful, even though the links to the dominant American puritanism were fast eroding away; the English gentry, with centuries-longer existence, failed to produce a genuine culture. The American planter was a recognizable reflection of his British cousin, in a completely rural atmosphere without the civilizing effect of London. In another generation or two the Texas planter might have become a patron of the arts, but this would not have replaced his preoccupation with his hounds. It was not incumbent upon a leisure class to create art, and the planter had visible business-capitalist origins, despite his movement in search of aristocracy.

Yet this life of Grecian symmetry, or monumental idleness, was producing intimations of an American culture quite different from the dominant puritanism of both the North and the South. A studied languor replaced the furious display of energy the middle class considered proper. Many planters worked at their businesses, and worked quite hard, but the trick was to pretend not to. Gentlemen did not sweat. Planters were not frugal or thrifty. Their tables carried enormous varieties of meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, hot breads, cakes, preserves, and jellies, as a facet of the code of hospitality. It was not unusual for a planter to seat forty people at lunch. He imported excellent boots and fine firearms from London, and wines and liquors from the Continent.

The planters, as a class, were not "moral" in the puritanical sense, as the farmer and tradesman tried to be. Planters drank, smoked, gambled, cursed, loved a horse race; they brooked no insults, either direct or subtly implied. There were dark corners in their sex lives that did not meet the Victorian codes. But the planter lived by a stern ethic, or was supposed to: he was gracious, hospitable, and courageous, decent rather than frigidly moral. He did not lie, cheat, or steal; he was considerate to "inferiors," and his womenfolk were always "ladies." On all these recognizable aristocratic manifestations the planters built an imposing image, both public and personal. It permeated the entire Texas frontier by 1861, because, as one historian rather sourly noted, enough of it was true.

Hundreds of miles from the lower Brazos where the plantation houses stood, mothers in dog-runs and sod shanties begged their frontiersmen sons to "act like Southern gentlemen." On the edge of nowhere, the Anglo-Celt farmer who had neither the inclination nor wherewithal to be hospitable to strangers felt called upon to ask passersby in for meals. On the frontier that eventually stretched from Brownsville to Calgary, many men learned unhappily that pistol-hung Texans of non-gentry background had somehow acquired a sense of honor that was better not scoffed at or impugned. In Texas, the influences of the planter class penetrated far beyond the falls of the Colorado. They sank into the far frontier and created a certain, lasting confusion in the Texas frontiersman's social patterns. He emerged part surly borderer, part puritan democrat, part normal Westerner, but with the traditions of the Southern gentleman seeded ineradicably in some corner of his soul. He could slip from one role to the other unconsciously, confusing everyone but himself. If the wheat farmers of Kansas evolved with certain differences from the corn hoers of Texas, it was because Kansas never had a planter class.

The inherent liberalism of the planter was not transmitted because it was the liberalism of social confidence, never that of conformity or popular prejudice. The old saying—anyone could enter through the planter's door, while the middle classes made inferiors and "niggers" go round back—had a biting truth. The planter, like the early Presidents from the same class, never cared what worse-disposed men wanted or believed; he deliberately gave each man his due, according to his worth or attainments. Negroes were slaves, and were treated like slaves—but the planter was more disposed to regard blacks as human beings than poor whites. He could value a good Negro above a poor white man, something the more tribal breeds of Americans never dared do. He demonstrably, in this era, took Jews and European Catholics on their personal merits; the only Jewish United States Senators in the 19th century were elected from the South. This liberalism, however, was regarded both by Northern businessmen and Southern poor whites as arrogance. The American concept of democracy, in the 19th century, was moving rapidly in the direction of mass conformity and the enforcement of popular prejudices.

In the same way, while many of the Southern universities and colleges were first rate and gave the planter a superb education to fulfill his role, they won no later praise. The antebellum universities were not organized to create an elite or permit the rise of some sort of new mandarin class from the soil. They were designed to train the existing elite, precisely like the universities of England. Politics and business, in Texas, were still amateur affairs, in an America that elsewhere was beginning to succumb to professionalism. The planter attitude toward education would not be dominant, because the farming mass looked upon it as a tool toward immediate, practical goals.

The entire existence of this glittering cotton empire was based on the subordination and labor of the Negro slaves. There were 182,000 blacks in bondage in Texas, approximately one-third the entire population. Slavery was not completely popular. It was disliked by most free farmers, on racial, social, and competitive grounds. The planters themselves never successfully rationalized the institution in moral terms. They recognized it as "peculiar," and justified it from the fact that it had "always" existed, and that the Negro was "racially inferior" and could fill no other social role. The whole slave society had gradually built itself, and the American nation with it, into a serious social trap; it was one that the 18th-century rational democracy of the Founding Fathers could find no escape from, for economic reasons.

But the problem of slavery was insoluble in Texas and the South for social reasons, too; the economic interests of the planters by no means provided its sole political cement. The private views of Abraham Lincoln, who hated the peculiar institution as much as any man, illustrate the terrible quandary Lincoln himself did not live to face. Lincoln, like almost all white Americans, did not consider the Negro an ethnic or social equal. The people who lived where there were no concentrations of Negroes could demand emancipation on moral grounds, without really thinking through the problems of citizenship, adjustment, and social role. The whites of Texas, and the South, could not. Negroes, in dozens of counties, outnumbered them, rich and poor alike.

To ignore ethnic attitudes and consciousness was simply to ignore or try to set aside all human history.

The lives of this slave class were utterly submerged. At a time when slavery had become the dominant popular issue of American politics, the slave himself had no role in it. Anglo-American law was forced by its own inherently liberal logic to dehumanize the Negro, because it could not accept the concept of subordination of one people to another, or inequality at law. This had created, and continued to create, a terrible moral confusion and definite hypocrisy in the American mind, toward both Indians and Negroes. Law, the organic cement that held American civilization together, never recognized the inherent tendency of a more powerful people to dispossess or take advantage of any weaker race upon whom they impinged. Law therefore adopted the concept that Negroes were not subordinated human beings, but mere chattels—property like swine or cattle—just as law also looked upon Amerinds as vermin. That this rationalization permitted and even justified far more damaging human crimes than a rationalization of inequality or conquest was desperately slow in reaching the American consciousness.

Both North and South and West did what came naturally to all peoples, but the 18th-century ideals and manifestos continued to lash and confuse the American conscience. The American response was to submerge a problem that could not be rationalized.

Under the Napoleonic Code, which governed other 19th-century areas where slavery existed in Western civilization, the slavemaster controlled the labor, but did not own the body, of his bondsman. This was more than a subtle difference; it was a recognition at law that the slave was human, and thus possessed certain human rights. He was entitled to some sort of family life. Significantly, the slave population of the Indies, while fully and cruelly exploited, never suffered the hideous scars of dehumanization inflicted upon American chattels. It was no accident that, in the 20th century, an enormous proportion of Negro leadership in America arrived out of other lands.

Under American law, the Negro slave could be sold at will, bred at will, and be separated from his mate and/or offspring at the whim of his owner. The utterly disastrous human results of generations of this treatment need hardly be explored. Another difference of American law was that children of slave mothers were slaves unto any generation; there was no provision for gradual emancipation as under other codes. Finally, under American law, one drop of African blood classified its possessor as a Negro, while Hispanic code and custom recognized interbreeding and accepted the concept of "dominant blood." In Hispanic America, in a process never fully understood in the United States, slaves or former slaves could breed themselves out of negritude, though it remained socially disastrous everywhere to be wholly black.

For some years there was a myth, created by Southern historians and widely accepted elsewhere, that Negroes were amenable to, and even happy with, slavery. Newspapers and private correspondence in Texas between 1850 and 1860 indicate that this view was entirely euphoric. The slaves were crushed psychologically, because they had all been born in bondage, and they were socially powerless. The African had a strong survival instinct, which led him to smile, sing, and endure. But in the Texas background there was always a foreboding threat of violence.

The fear of a slave rebellion lay endemic over the black areas of Texas.

There was one uprising in Colorado County in 1856; apparently a number of Negroes secured and hid arms. They planned to rebel, kill the local whites, then fight their way to Mexico and legal freedom. This plot was discovered and crushed with terrible severity. A number of Negroes were killed in various ways, and about two hundred "severely punished," as current accounts read. It was widely believed that Mexicans in the area had instigated this abortive revolt, which was a normal mechanism of psychological defense. The planters of Colorado and Matagorda counties forced all Mexicans out, and passed resolutions never again to hire or employ a Mexican. By the late '50s, the discussion and miasmic fear of a slave revolt had reached almost hysteric proportions in some regions of Texas. Rumors—always false—of massacres in adjoining counties arose. No planter was willing to believe his own chattels were at the point of revolt, but most held an underlying fear that his neighbors' Negroes were lusting for white blood.

This incipient hysteria was strengthened, if not entirely caused, by abolitionist agitation in the North, which at this time, with almost lip-smacking satisfaction, was prophesying chaos and murder in the South. It did not affect just the planters; in fact, it seemed to affect them least. All whites, particularly the non-slavers, were antagonized and terrorized by the thought of Negroes being instigated or set loose upon the countryside. "Vigilance committees" and posses were formed in most counties, to bring back runaways or put down any sign of slave resistance.