LOUIS W. STEVENSON¹Louis W. Stevenson (?–1888), a native New Yorker, was a classic carpetbagger. After service as a junior commissioned officer in the 176th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Civil War, he held positions in the Freedmen’s Bureau as assistant superintendent in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1867, and as subassistant commissioner in Carrollton, Texas, throughout 1868. While the Republicans held power in Texas in the early 1870s, Stevenson served short stints as a district and then state superintendent of public schools, as well as the financial agent of the state prison system. During this period, Stevenson acted as an agent for the New National Era in Texas. When the Texas Republican party fractured in 1871–72, he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the Third District as the Radical candidate, the favorite of small farmers and African Americans. After the Democrats gained ascendancy in Texas in 1873, he moved to Galveston, where he was involved in several businesses before acquiring a position at the U.S. Customs House. From 1883 until his death in 1888, he was based in Laredo, working as the general freight and passenger agent for the Mexican National Railway, an American venture that linked Mexico City with Corpus Christi. Stevenson perfectly matches the modern (post-1960) historians’ profile of the carpetbagger—those northerners who moved to the South after the Civil War: young and idealistic, they served in the Union army or the Freedmen’s Bureau and were genuine supporters of African American civil rights and true believers in the power of modernization to bring social progress. NNE, 18 August 1870; “U.S., City Directories, 1822–1995”; “Westchester County, New York, Letters of Testamentary, vol. O–P, 1884–1889, 355,” Ancestry.com; “New York, Wills and Probate Records, 1659–1999,” Ancestry.com; Galveston (Tex.) Daily News, 3, 22 August, 16 September 1871, 16, 18 May 1872, 12 April 1877, 13 May 183, 17 March 1884; Fred Wilbur Powell, The Railroads of Mexico (Boston, 1921), 133–35; Carl H. Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas (Austin, Tex., 1980), 156–57, 159–60; William L. Richter, Overreached on All Sides: The Freedmen’s Bureau Administrators in Texas, 1865–1868 (College Station, Tex., 1991), 243–44, 287–88; Alton Hornsby, Jr., “The Freedmen’s Bureau Schools in Texas, 1865–1870,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 76: 415–17 (April 1973). TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Huntsville, Tex. 15 Sept[ember] 1870.

HON. FREDERICK DOUGLASS,

WASHINGTON, D. C.

MY DEAR SIR:

It affords me great pleasure to have the honor to acknowledge the receipt
of your esteemed favor of the 8th inst.

I am grateful at the change which has taken place in the editorial
management of the NEW NATIONAL ERA, not because of any short comings on the part of the late editor, but because your name will give prestige
to the paper, which will extend its circulation.²The New National Era experienced serious financial problems in its first year of publication. Many of its original shareholders withdrew, and J. Sella Martin was forced to step down as editor in the summer of 1870. To save the failing publication, Douglass relocated to the nation’s capital. With his sons Lewis and Frederick Jr., he purchased a half interest in the newspaper and became the editor of the renamed Washington New National Era. NNE, 1 September 1870.

Our people want the truth spread abroad among them. They have
been so fooled by political demagogues, and talking editors—styled Republican, and to that extent, that there is great danger of Texas following
in the wake of North Carolina, at the next election.³Stevenson is referring to the egregious corruption associated with the railroad subsidies that the North Carolina legislature provided in 1868 and 1869 to the “ring” headed by Milton S. Littlefield and George W. Swepson, a friend and adviser of the Republican governor, William W. Holden. The ring collapsed on 24 September 1869, Black Friday, a financial panic that left the state in difficult financial straits for years to come. Among the many services North Carolina could no longer adequately fund was its new public school system, the primary source of education for its thousands of poor whites and African American freedmen—the Republicans’ two primary constituencies. Although political corruption was undoubtedly bipartisan in Reconstruction North Carolina (as it was in all states, north and south), its Republican-dominated legislature and governor inevitably received the bulk of public scorn throughout the state and across the nation. Many factors played a part in the Republican party’s loss of control of the North Carolina legislature in the fall elections of 1870, but the organization’s unraveling began with the loss of legitimacy it suffered from the railroad scandals. Stevenson is concerned that something similar might happen in Texas. Foner, Reconstruction, 386–87, 440–44; Charles L. Price, “The Railroad Schemes of George W. Swepson,” East Carolina Publications in History, 1: 32–50 (1964).

Our Legislature proved corrupt. The Republican leaders sold themselves for gold.⁴The Texas Republican party during Reconstruction consisted of disparate elements that felt compelled to keep the planters who had led the state out of the Union in 1861 out of power in the postwar era. Therefore, despite Republicans holding the governor’s office and clear majorities in both houses of the Twelfth General Assembly, extensive negotiations, executive coercion, and distasteful compromises were needed to get bills passed and signed into law in the spring and summer of 1870. Governor Edmund J. Davis, leader of the Radical faction, put forward a broad program that centered on the establishment of a state police force and a state militia to protect white and black Republicans from ex-Confederate vigilantes, and frontier settlements from Indian raids, along with a highly centralized and racially integrated system of free public schools. But state senators representing railroad interests refused to allow the program to pass unless they received subsidies for their favorite projects. Radicals close to Davis agreed to exchange the police and militia bills for two railroad bills, although it is uncertain whether Davis ever approved the deal. Regardless, Davis signed his prized law enforcement bills, but vetoed the railroad bills, claiming that they were unconstitutional. Davis argued that the Southern Pacific bill violated the prohibition against land grants and that the Houston and Texas Central bill invested school funds in the failing railroad’s bonds, in clear violation of school-funding provisions. While extensive negotiations between the governor and legislators worked out the first impasse, the second bill was passed over Davis’s veto. For Radicals who valued public education, like Louis W. Stevenson, it was a bitter blow, especially since the legislature had already gutted the school bill by placing most control of education in the hands of local authorities. These actions ensured the creation of racially segregated dual systems, both of which, and particularly the black schools, would be severely underfunded. Stevenson called these deeds corrupt. Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865–1877 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 150–52; Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas, 135–44; John M. Brockman, “Railroads, Radicals, and the Militia Bill: A New Interpretation of the Quorum-Breaking Incident of 1870,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 83: 105–22 (October 1979). Do us the favor to look into some of our Railroad
schemes—the vetoes of the Governor,⁵Edmund Jackson Davis (1827–83) was a Texas Unionist, Union army officer, leader of the Texas Radical Republicans, and the last Reconstruction governor of Texas. Born and educated in St. Augustine, Florida, he studied law in Corpus Christi, where he was admitted to the bar in 1849. In 1853 he won election as district attorney of the Twelfth Judicial District in Brownsville, and in 1856 was appointed judge of the same district, a position he held until removed in 1861. Typical of many in South Texas, Davis staunchly opposed secession and refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Confederacy. He moved to New Orleans, where he recruited and led the First Texas Cavalry (U.S. Volunteers), which saw extensive service in the Gulf theater. He was one of only two Texans to be appointed general by the United States during the war. Upon returning to Texas, he quickly became the leader of the Radical wing of the Republican party, favoring restricted political rights for secessionists, expanded rights for blacks, including suffrage, and the ab initio theory, which held that all laws passed since secession were null and void. Under the military rule provided by Congressional Reconstruction, he was president of the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1868–69, and he won a close election for the governorship in fall 1869. His administration was highly controversial: it pursued a program that would centralize power in Austin, uphold the civil rights of Republicans, white and black, through a strong state police and militia, and create a system of free public schools. These measures were strongly opposed by Democrats and moderate Republicans, who combined to decisively defeat Davis in his bid for reelection in 1873. As an Austin attorney, he continued to head the Texas Republican party until his death in 1883, although he was never again elected to office. Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas, 129–30; James A. Baggett, “Birth of the Texas Republican Party,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 78: 1–20 (July 1974); James Alex Baggett, “Origins of Early Texas Republican Party Leadership,” JSH, 40: 441–54 (August 1974); “Davis, Edmund Jackson,” Handbook of Texas (online). and see who voted for there roads,
giving away our school fund, over the veto. Ventilate some of the leading
so-called Republicans, who are now trying to throw dust in the people’s
eyes preparatory to the next election.

Texas is far from you, but we want you near. The advice you give will
be pure and disinterested. Your paper can be made the greatest power in
the State. Something must be done to restore the lost confidence, or the
party is dead in Texas.

Yours truly,

LOUIS W. STEVENSON.

PLSr: , 29 September 1870.