Oran Milo Roberts, Texas's Forgotten Fire-Eater
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THE OLD ALCALDE: ORAN MILO ROBERTS, TEXAS’S FORGOTTEN FIRE-EATER William C. Yancey Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2016 APPROVED: Richard B. McCaslin, Major Professor and Chair of the Department of History Randolph B. Campbell, Committee Member Harland Hagler, Committee Member Andrew Torget, Committee Member John Windsor, Committee Member Constantinos Tsatsoulis, Interim Dean of Toulouse Graduate School Yancey, William C. The Old Alcalde: Oran Milo Roberts, Texas’s Forgotten Fire-Eater. Doctor of Philosophy (History), May 2016, 299 pp., references, 124 titles. Oran Milo Roberts was at the center of every important event in Texas between 1857 and 1883. He served on the state supreme court on three separate occasions, twice as chief justice. As president of the 1861 Secession Convention he was instrumental in leading Texas out of the Union. He then raised and commanded an infantry regiment in the Confederate Army. After the Civil War, Roberts was a delegate to the 1866 Constitutional Convention, and was elected by the state legislature to the United States Senate, though Republicans in Congress refused to seat him. He served two terms as governor from 1879 to 1883. Despite being a major figure in Texas history, there are no published biographies of Roberts. This dissertation seeks to examine Roberts’s place in Texas history and analyze the factors that drove him to seek and exercise power. It will also explore the major events in which he participated and determine his historical legacy to the state. Copyright 2016 by William C. Yancey ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: “SUCH WAS MY RAISING IN THE MOUNTAINS” 10 CHAPTER 3: “I WOULD WISH TO BE A LAWYER” 41 CHAPTER 4: “I AM IN FAVOR OF A PROMPT AND ENERGETIC 71 SUPPORT OF THE RIGHTS OF THE SOUTH” CHAPTER 5: “I BOW TO THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLE 106 OF MY STATE” CHAPTER 6: “DEFEATED BY LIMITATION OF TIME AND PUBLIC 135 POLICY” CHAPTER 7: “THIS MUST BE A WHITE MAN’S GOVERNMENT” 166 CHAPTER 8: “THE MOST PROPER MAN FOR THE SUPREME 208 BENCH” CHAPTER 9: “TEXAS WILL THEN BE A GREAT STATE INDEED” 237 CHAPTER 10: “A TEXAN OF THE TEXANS” 270 CHAPTER 11: CONCLUSION 289 BIBLIOGRAPHY 292 iii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Few public figures in Texas have affected the state as profoundly as Oran Milo Roberts. From the mid-1850s until his death in 1898, Roberts was not only involved in every major event in Texas politics, he drove them. During the 1850s he was a power broker in the states’ rights wing of the Texas Democratic Party, and from his position on the state supreme court, provided the philosophical underpinnings to support secession. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, Roberts maneuvered his state out of the Union by circumventing Governor Sam Houston. He then defended Texas by raising and commanding an infantry regiment in the Confederate Army. Roberts served as an important delegate in the 1866 Constitutional Convention, and was later selected by the state legislature to represent Texas in the United States Senate, although Republicans in Congress refused to seat him and other southern legislators. When Democrats regained power in Texas, he was appointed, and then elected chief justice of the Texas supreme court. Roberts then served two terms as governor, and forced his party to make hard choices about spending, taxation and land policy. He was also instrumental in the founding of the University of Texas and the building of a new capitol. After leaving public office in 1883, he was appointed to be the University’s first law professor, a position he held for ten years, teaching hundreds of young Texas lawyers his legal and political philosophy. During his retirement, he corresponded with governors, state legislators, congressmen and senators, all of whom sought his advice on subjects as varied as taxation, monetary policy, Populism, and railroad policy. In short, Roberts was at the center of every major political event in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century. 1 Though Roberts is a central figure in dozens of monographs, there are no published biographies of him. The closest thing to a full biography is a Ph.D. dissertation written by Leila Bailey in 1932 at the University of Texas. Bailey wrote her dissertation at a time when the Dunning School interpretation of southern history (a benevolent, chivalric, slaveholding South overwhelmed by the industrial North and forced to endure the horrors of Yankee occupation and black political participation) was dominant in southern universities. Bailey’s work certainly reflects the milieu in which it was written, and it often borders on hagiography. For example, in her preface, she wrote, “I awakened to the fact that I had the problem of presenting to an unsuspecting public one of the greatest characters that has adorned the pages of Texas history – a man who combined the greatest number of the attributes of greatness and exhibited less of the detractive qualities.”1 Although not a biography, one prominent general work on Texas history in which Roberts figures prominently is Randolph B. Campbell’s Gone To Texas. Campbell first introduced Roberts as chairman of the secession convention, mentioned his prominent role in the Constitution of 1866, and devoted two or three pages to his administration as governor. Because Gone to Texas covers prehistoric times to the present, Campbell did not go into deep detail about Roberts. He did mention one of Roberts’s major purposes during Reconstruction, writing of the Constitution of 1866: Nevertheless, it was clear that where freedmen were concerned, the convention had followed the wishes of Oran M. Roberts, the chairman of the secession convention and former Confederate colonel who served as a delegate even though he did not yet have a presidential pardon. We must form, Roberts said, “a white man’s Gov[ernmen]t” that will “keep Sambo from the polls.”2 1 Leila Bailey, “The Life and Public Career of O.M. Roberts, 1815-1883” ( Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas, 1932), iii. 2 Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 270. 2 Several monographs on specific aspects of Texas history have also devoted a significant amount of space to Roberts. An excellent source of information on his judicial career is James L. Haley’s, The Texas Supreme Court. Haley wrote extensively about Roberts’s career on the Supreme Court, from his election as associate justice in 1857, through his tenure as chief justice from 1864-1865 and again from 1874-1878. He presented Roberts as a fire-eater who evolved over time into a fair and erudite magistrate. For example, Haley introduced the judge by writing, “Roberts expressed pro-southern views and ardent admiration of the southern firebrand John C. Calhoun, making Roberts a profound disappointment to his first Texas mentor, Sam Houston, who had appointed him district attorney for San Augustine in 1844.” When writing of Roberts’s term as chief justice from 1874-1878, Haley argued that Roberts had evolved to a degree, writing, “As chief justice, Roberts managed to reinvent himself from Confederate firebrand to an elder statesman of judicial sagacity.”3 As Roberts was a central player in the secession movement in Texas, it is to be expected that the most comprehensive book on that movement, Walter Buenger’s Secession and the Union in Texas, should deal with him often. Buenger portrays Roberts as extremely rational and legalistic in his views on secession. When detailing the beginnings of the secession movement, Buenger wrote of Roberts and his friend John H. Reagan, “For these two lawyers, secession was not to be a chaotic social revolution but a well-considered legal step which would preserve and promote stability.” He further asserted that Roberts viewed secession as a movement of a broad swath of respectable Texas society, writing: As Reagan and Roberts had hoped since October [1860], the convention represented the best men of Texas – not the richest slaveholders, for there were 3 James L. Haley, The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836-1986, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 60 [first quotation], 92 [second quotation]. 3 few of those present, but the prosperous farmers, lawyers, and small planters who dominated the economic, political, and social life of much of Texas.4 Ten More Texans in Gray, edited by W. C. Nunn, devoted a chapter to Roberts. The chapter’s author, Ford Dixon, a graduate student at Texas Christian University, provided a brief sketch of Roberts’s life but appropriately focused on secession and the Civil War. Dixon, like Buenger, viewed Roberts as a man driven by the law and devoted to secession as an orderly movement. Dixon wrote, “O.M. Roberts was a man of the law all his life. He was, like Calhoun, absolutely convinced of the legality of secession.” He added, “Roberts supported secession only because he thought it right just and legal.”5 Few scholarly works deal with Roberts’s military service during the Civil War, undistinguished as it was. The most important work to mention Roberts to any notable degree is Richard Lowe’s Walker’s Texas Division. Lowe gave a detailed description of the Battle of Bayou Bourbeau near Opelousas, Louisiana, the only combat Roberts saw during the war. He gave no judgment of Roberts’s conduct in the battle, but included him when discussing the postwar career of many of the veterans of Walker’s Texas Division, writing, that these men were determined: to preserve the old order as much as possible.