| This study examines Reconstruction's collapse in Texas and the role an often-divided Democratic party created for the state government with respect to economic development, the provision of public services, and the distribution of Texas's natural wealth. Like other postbellum southern states, Texas had to work through the consequences both of emancipation and of the maturation of a more thoroughly commercial cotton economy. However, Texas's western aspects intruded upon its southern history in profound ways, such that the tools of political taxonomy developed to describe the New South seem inadequate to address its experience. Like many frontier states, Texas experienced tremendous demographic growth, driven in its case chiefly by the migration westward of white, disproportionately Democratic, southerners. This fact made the establishment of Democratic control at the state level rather easily accomplished, but complicated often neglected dimensions of "Redemption"--the extension of conservative authority in the legal system and in local government. Given their large majorities in most localities, many Democrats hardly felt compelled to embrace measures designed to aid their peers in those communities where a significant political threat remained, such as in black-majority counties and certain cities. Texas's southwestern heritage, however, helped Redeemer Democrats address a second political dilemma. After surrendering its nationhood in 1845, Texas, unlike all but the first states, retained control of its public domain. Rather than relying primarily on tax revenue, Redeemers granted public land to corporations and settlers and reserved it for the benefit of education, hoping to lessen the fiscal burdens Reconstruction government had placed on citizens while not depriving Texans of expected governmental services or undermining causes they wished the state to promote. By the mid-1880s these developmental strategies collapsed under the weight of the manifold purposes and extravagant expectations which public land had to bear, requiring Texans to confront choices familiar to other southern Democrats--those between spending tax revenue and doing without. As the state's western reaches became more thickly settled, then, Texas, in terms of political economy, became more southern. |
