Governors who have been, and other public men of Texas, Part 10

Author: Kittrell, Norman Goree, 1849-1927
Publication date: 1921
Publisher: Houston, Texas, Dealy-Adey-Elgin company
Number of Pages: 320


USA > Texas > Governors who have been, and other public men of Texas > Part 10


Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).


Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30


Governor Ireland was a genuine Democrat and a gentleman, and Lawrence Barrett was a strikingly handsome, well bred, graceful man, worthy to be received by any Governor, and he gladly accompanied me to the Governor's office. He was re- ceived by the Governor with marked cordiality and very gracious courtesy, and the meeting was evidently a great pleasure to both. I felt sure the Governor would express his appreciation of the call by going to see Mr. Barrett play that night, and he did. I was curious to know what he thought of it, and asked him. His reply was: "Kittrell, it was the finest thing I ever saw in my life. I enjoyed it immensely, and I am obliged to you for advising me to go."


A few years ago a brother lawyer related to me the following incident in the life of Governor Ireland which he related as if he


94


GOVERNORS WHO HAVE BEEN


knew it to be true, and as he is an honorable man, and a distant relative of Governor Ireland, I accepted it as true :


He said Governor Ireland walked into the office of a lawyer whom he knew, and calling him by his given name, said: "How are you?" The lawyer replied: "Not well, Governor. I am de- pressed and feel badly." The Governor had a paper in his hand, and said: "I chanced to see in this paper that your property is advertised under foreclosure sale. How did that happen?" The lawyer said: "It was a purchase money debt, and business had been bad, and he was simply unable to meet his payments. Gov- ernor Ireland said: "Why didn't you let me know? I might have been able to help you." The lawyer replied: "Why, Governor, you were under no obligation to me. I had no earthly reason for asking you to pay my debts, and besides when you were a candi- date for Congress against Colonel Schleicher I took the stump against you." The Governor said: "Well, you had the right to do that. This is a free country, and Schleicher was an able man, and you had the right to help elect him. How much do you owe? What will it take to pay the debt?" The debtor named a very considerable sum as the sale was of his home. Governor Ireland turned and walked out, but returned in a few minutes and handed the despairing debtor a check to cover the full amount of the debt, interests and costs, saying as he did so: "Take this, and if you can pay it back, do so. If not, your home is saved." and quietly withdrew.


He may have been "cold," as his enemies said he was, but the man who did what John Ireland did for an unfortunate fellow- man, is such a man as is rare, and the world sorely needs more "cold" men.


95


AND OTHER PUBLIC MEN OF TEXAS


CHAPTER XV.


Governor Ireland held the office of Governor during the years 1883-4-5-6, and he was followed by Lawrence Sullivan Ross, "the Little Cavalryman," who was nominated at Galveston in the sum- mer of 1886. As I now recall, he and D. C. Giddings of Brenham and Marion Martin of Corsicana were the candidates for the guber- natorial nomination. Colonel Giddings was a successful business man; had twice been a member of Congress, and would have made an excellent Governor, but no man could have defeated "Sul" Ross in that convention.


No man was worthier to have been Governor of Texas than was Colonel Giddings, who was called by his intimate friends "Clint." He was, as I have heard, in early life a conductor on the railroad running from Hempstead to Brenham, when Brenham was the teminus of what is now the Austin branch of the H. & T. C. R. R.


He later read law and became a partner in the practice of his elder brother, Colonel J. D. Giddings, who was for many years a successful practitioner at the bar of Brenham, a town that has furnished the bar of Texas with as many lawyers who rose to pro- fessional and official distinction, as has any town in the State of its population, and more than many larger towns can boast of.


Colonel Giddings, I think, raised and commanded a regiment in the Confederate Army, and after the war, his brother and himself entered into the banking business at Brenham in the firm name of Giddings & Giddings. The bank was opened in 1866, as I recall, and under the management of the son of Colonel D. C. Giddings, is yet a stable and prosperous institution. The son, who is a most efficient and useful citizen, has proven worthy of his noble sire.


There came into Texas in reconstruction days a man from the North-a typical carpet-bagger. He had been, I think, a briga- dier general in the Northern army, and saw in the then condition of Texas what appeared to him to be a most excellent opportunity to indulge in (as the Pilgrim fathers said when they plundered the Indians) "much gayneful pillage."


In, I beileve, 1869, when E. J. Davis was elected Governor, the carpet-bagger was elected to Congress by the negro vote, to which he catered, and his affiliation was almost wholly with the mem- bers of that race. He, of course, abused the South and the Demo- cratic party and mocked at the misery of the people he and his fellow carpet-baggers were plundering.


His name was William T. Clark. He was rather a good looking man and a stylish dresser, and his dudish appearance won for him the sobriquet of "Tomtit Clark." I heard him ranting before a crowd of negroes who howled with approval whenever he abused the South and the Democratic party.


As I think of it all now, I am reminded of the famous retort


96


GOVERNORS WHO HAVE BEEN


made, I believe, by L. Q. C. Lamar to some Northern Senator who was pouring out the vials of his partisan wrath on the head of Jefferson Davis, "whose shoe's latchet" the traducer "was not worthy to unloose." Senator Lamar said: "When Prometheus was chained to the cold rocks of Mount Caucasus it was a vulture and not an eagle which preyed upon his vitals."


In 1871 "Tomtit" Clark came back to Texas and ran for Con- gress again, and Colonel Giddings was the Democratic candidate.


It may have been that the election was for the state at large. I am not sure, but in any event; the territory to be covered was of immense area. Colonel Giddings covered it. The officials vested with the function of returning officers were, of course, Repub- licans, most likely carpet-baggers or scallawags, who were worse, if possible, and they gave "Tomtit" the certificate of election.


Colonel Giddings promptly filed notice of contest, and with unflagging energy and at great expense, all borne by himself, got up the testimony to be presented to the Committee on Contested Elections of an overwhelming Republican Congress.


The Committee reported unanimously in Colonel Giddings' favor, and so overwhelmingly did he prove that he had received a major- ity of the votes amounting to thousands, that, marvelous to relate every vote in Congress was cast to adopt the report, save one, and that was cast by William "Tomtit" Clark. The fraud of the re- turning officers was made so manifest that a rankly radical Con- gress gave an ex-Confederate Colonel, who was a Democrat, his seat-the only decent act ever performed by it, where Southern interests were concerned, so far as my recollection extends. Colo- nel Giddings was elected to Congress again in 1876, the year Samuel J. Tilden was elected, but as everybody knows, the will of the people was thwarted, and the office stolen by the same kind of returning board that tried to steal the election from Colonel Giddings. No man ever performed a greater service for Texas and the Democratic party and the cause of honest elections, than did Dewitt Clinton Giddings when he, single-handed, defeated the efforts of a lot of corrupt partisan officials to debauch an election in Texas, and when he drove a conscienceless obtruder into the obscurity he so fitly adorns. Colonel Giddings passed away a few years ago at his home in Brenham, and above his honored dust rests the soil of his beloved state, whose faithful and fearless adopted son he was.


As I recall, wholly from memory, the vote for Governor Ross in the first ballot was 406, which made it evident that opposition was useless. It was at that convention that the public career of J. S. Hogg as related to the whole state began. He was nominated for Attorney General, thanks to the fidelity and devotion of as steadfast and enthusiastic a body of followers as ever stood be-


97


AND OTHER PUBLIC MEN OF TEXAS


hind a candidate. I trust to be able later to do justice to him and his remarkable career and valuable services to Texas.


Governor Ross polled 228,776 votes, defeating his Republican opponent three and one-half to one. I recall no gubernatorial ad- ministration in Texas that was so free from friction, or that was so little subjected to criticism as was that of Governor Ross. He had been sheriff, member of the constitutional convention of 1875 and later a member of the Senate, but was not as widely known as have been some candidates before, or so well. He was a man of culture and courage, and of an order of integrity so high, that even suspicion of infidelity concerning him was im- possible. He had the commendable ambition to be Governor of the State in which he had lived since he was an infant at his mother's breast. He had fought Indians on her border e're he had attained his manhood, and had, as a commander in the Confederate Army, participated in 127 battles, big and little, before he was 27 years old, at which age he was a Brigadier General. He had no special fondness for politics, and after his first term of service as Senator, declined to run again.


The nominating convention met at Hillsboro, I think, and after several days of political battle neither of the two candidates could get the necessary two-thirds vote, so the convention nominated him and adjourned.


I happened to meet him shortly afterwards and said: "Well, General, they drafted you." "Yes," he said. "I am sorry they did. If I had known of it before the convention adjourned, I would not have accepted, but after it had adjourned, I could not afford to force another convention on the district by declining the nomination, so I was obliged to accept."


My recollection is that when Governor Ross was in the Senate the last time the sessions were held in a hall over the drug store now at the corner of Ninth Street and Congress Avenue, while the House held its sessions in the Millet Opera House, now the Millet Mansion. That was a very strong Senate. That can be said of any Senate that contained such men as L. S. Ross, A. W. Terrell, and Charles Stewart of Harris County, who was for ten years a member of Congress from Texas-a man big of body and brain, and of high character.


Some who read this may not know that there was a negro Senator in that body-a genuine black negro. His name was Burton, and he was from Fort Bend County, and in reconstruc- tion times was sheriff of that county. He was a respectful, re- spectable, sensible honest man, and his conduct and bearing as a member of the Senate so commended him to his fellow mem- bers that a number of them, perhaps all, joined in presenting him with a handsome ebony walking stick, gold mounted. That was seventeen years after the close of the Civil War, yet a negro was


98


GOVERNORS WHO HAVE BEEN


representing a senatorial district in Texas where the Democratic vote of the whole state was 4 to 1 as compared with the Re- publican.


Seventeen years later I saw a white Democrat of an old and most excellent Texas family, a young man of ability, give up his seat in the House to a negro, pursuant to the report of the Com- mittee on Contested Elections of a Texas Legislature, yet it is preached in the North that we roast negroes here to make a Southern holiday. I have heard that Senator Burton owned a plantation, or at least a large farm, and possessed a comfortable fortune. I have heard the statement made, and have never heard it contradicted, that his old mistress in Mississippi was greatly impoverished by the war and that up to the time of her death he sent her $50 a month and erected a monument over her grave, and that when his young mistress married he sent her a thousand dollars as a wedding present. If this statement is true, even in part, the gift of his brother Senators was worthily bestowed.


When speaking of "public men in Texas" his name might not be suggested, but he was in public station pursuant to lawful proceedings, and having proved himself morally worthy, he is entitled to recognition.


Governor Ross was as efficient and successful as President of the A. and M. College as he had been as Governor. He was one of those plain, simple, unpretentious, yet forceful and efficient men, who arrived at every goal he set for himself, and measured up to the demands of every situation. Just after the announce- ment of his election to the presidency of the A. and M. I met a drummer friend who traveled in East Texas territory. I was raised in large part in East Texas and am a great believer in that section of the State. I asked my friend what the news was in my old territory. He said: "All I heard was fixing up to send boys to the A. and M. I'll swear I believe every man that was a soldier under Governor Ross is going to send his son to school under him. They said 'Little Sul' is running the A. and M. now and we know where to send our boys. We know him be- cause we followed him for four years." They were right, for neither they nor any other man ever followed a gamer or more gallant leader. He always led. He said, "boys, come on." He never said "go on." His habits of fighting time stayed with him. About two years before his death, I was invited to deliver the Commencement address at the college. My wife and I were his guests. He had a large room upstairs known as his room, but which he rarely occupied in summer. He apologized for being compelled to assign my wife and me to a small (but entirely comfortable) room on account of the number of his guests. He said : "I sleep out here on the gallery. I have slept on the


99


AND OTHER PUBLIC MEN OF TEXAS


pairie and in the woods so much that the inside of the house is too cramped and confining for me. You will find a box of cigars on the table in there-help yourself. I rarely touch them. I keep a sack of tobacco and a supply of shucks and stick to cigarettes." He caught the cold which ended his life on a hunting trip. In his passing, Texas sustained an almost irreparable loss. He loved his tent, and the winds, and the running waters here, and it is comforting to believe that the tent of the heroic soldier is pitched now on the banks of the river of life, by which blossom and bloom the trees of Paradise.


100


GOVERNORS WHO HAVE BEEN


CHAPTER XVI.


The nomination of James S. Hogg in 1890 was predestined before the campaign began. As well as I can recollect, the only opponent who took the stump against him or offered for the nomination, was Gustave Cook of Harris County, at that time Judge of the Criminal District Court of Harris and Galveston Counties, but his candidacy was of no avail, nor would that of any other man have been.


The Bard of Avon said 300 years ago that "there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune," and the saying is as true now as it was when Shakespeare wrote it down, and James S. Hogg illustrated its truth most forcefully.


There were many who believed that he was merely an ordinary politician, who designedly stirred up prejudice against the rail- roads in order to win votes and ride into office. I may have thought so myself, but I was on the Bench and took no part in poli- tics. Looking back upon the condition and events of thirty years ago, I do not believe the charge was true. In the first place, James S. Hogg was not an ordinary politician, nor an ordinary man in any way.


I say this with entire sincerity, though I never voted for his nomination, and though our personal relations at one time became very much strained, it might be said, hostile, I have never been able, and never desired to be able to keep alive resentment, or cherish malice or ill will.


The railroads of Texas had unquestionably done much to arouse public sentiment. There was practically no restraint in the matter of issuance of stocks and bonds, and they indulged, perhaps from necessity, resulting from fierce competition, in ruinously unjust discrimination in freight charges, and the very best interests of the state, indeed its good name, demanded cor- rection of such evils.


As Attorney General, Governor Hogg, as I recall, sought relief for the people through the courts, but the result of his efforts was not such as was satisfactory to him, and he therefore de- termined to carry the fight to the people. He had been reared in poverty, and had mixed much with the plain people, and be- lieved in them. I have no doubt that he believed that as the champion of the people against the railroads he could win the Governorship, and that was a very commendable and laudable ambition, and to make the attempt along those lines was entirely legitimate politics. I believe, too, that he had a higher and more unselfish purpose than merely obtaining an office-that he had wrought out in his mind certain plans and policies which he believed if put into execution, would correct existing conditions,


101


AND OTHER PUBLIC MEN OF TEXAS


and regulate railroad management in such way as would be best for the people and for the roads.


The object of his deepest interest and most persistent purpose was a railroad commission, and he believed, as I understood, that such a body could be created under the Constitution as it then existed, but the consensus of opinion of the ablest lawyers in the Legislature was that a constitutional amendment would be necessary. I recall that L. A. Abercrombie of Huntsville, who was elected Senator in 1886, and consequently held over until 1890, favored a railroad commission, but believed it could not be lawfully created until the constitution was amended; and he was one of the best lawyers ever in that, or any other Texas Senate, and I believe, but am not sure, that he drafted the amend- ment.


The commission came in due time, as did the stock and bond law and other constructive and salutary legislation which Gov- ernor Hogg advocated, and when he left office in January, 1895, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the fight he began four, yes, six years before, had been won. No ordinary man would have ever worked out such a plan-certainly would not have carried it into full fruition.


National and State history teach us that it has ever been that when conditions reach a state of emergency and peril, out of the very stress and strain of the siuation there is always evolved some man who was destined to correct the evils which threaten the welfare of the people. Samuel J. Tilden, single-handed, ex- cept for the aid of Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, crushed into powder the most corrupt and most powerful municipal ring of thieves and public plunderers that ever cursed a great city.


Grover Cleveland cleaned out the festering corruption in mu- nicipal government in Buffalo, and at the expense of his defeat for the Presidency, denounced the Senate Tariff bill of 1888 as an "act of national perfidy and dishonor," and the people made him President again in 1892.


James S. Hogg did not have to deal with a case of moral cor- ruption. The railroads exercised powers which they had at least the legal right to exercise, because there was no law to pre- vent what they did. The credit of the State must have been irreparably injured if counties were not restrained and bond issues regulated, and Governor Hogg argued that law and morals should go hand in hand. I have said that his relations and mine became strained. The estrangement arose during the campaign in 1892 between him and Hon. George Clark. On the Clark ticket was an uncle of mine whom I loved better than any man on earth, and I took up the cudgel for him in resenting remarks made about him by Governor Hogg; but with me all bitterness ended with the end of the campaign. I feel that much must be


102


GOVERNORS WHO HAVE BEEN


pardoned in a man when he was fighting as he believed, not only in defense of cherished ideals and policies, but for his very political life. I never felt or expressed any doubt of his integ- rity of purpose or action.


He left the impress of his constructive statesmanship upon the Statutes of Texas, and he will be remembered for his virtues long after his faults are forgotten. That he rendered the people of Texas much needed and most valuable service there is no doubt, and it is very gratifying to know that there has come, as the fruit and planning and foresight, wealth and comfort to his very worthy and deserving children.


The morning his death was announced the president and man- aging head of the Houston Chronicle sent a request to me at the courthouse, while I was on the Bench, asking me to prepare an editorial tribute. It had, necessarily, to be very brief, because the editorial page was ready to go to press, and was being held for the tribute.


I wrote it as fast as my pencil could fly over the paper, and it gave me very great satisfaction to be told a few days later by one of Governor Hogg's law partners, Frank C. Jones, Sr., who was, and is, a very highly esteemed friend of mine, that of all the newspaper tributes paid their father, my brief one gave to his family the most satisfaction. There was not a word in the few lines I wrote that was not true; and that I did not feel.


The campaign of 1892 between Governor Hogg and Judge Clark for strenuousness, vigor and bitterness, will long remain the standard. It was as lamentable as it was unnecessary, but it cleared the political atmosphere, gave each faction more respect for the other, and when peace was declared, the party was stronger than ever. Such conflicts, even between candidates of different parties, are to be regretted, and when they arise be- tween men of the same party, they are tragically deplorable.


Every man in Texas knew then as well as he knows now, that George Clark was an honest man, a gentleman and a patriot, yet he was charged with being in the pay of the railroads, and the the representative of capitalists who wanted to exploit Texas, and many other kindred charges were made against him, for no other reason than that he differed from his opponent as to what financial, industrial and economical policies were best for Texas, but in that mad hour of passion men ceased to reason.


I was on the Bench at the time, but I favored Judge Clark's elec- tion. I never yet saw any kind of a political situation that would cause me as between two men of my own party, to vote against my personal friend.


Friendship with me is a sacred creed. When I come to stand before the bar of final judgment I doubt not that the catalogue of my offenses will be long and large, but I do not believe there


103


AND OTHER PUBLIC MEN OF TEXAS


will be found there even one time the charge that I ever failed a friend or forgot a favor. I do not believe my "dearest foe" will charge that against me.


George Clark was my personal friend. His father and my father were friends, and lived in the same county in Alabama, and he and I were born in the same county, though he was quite a number of years my senior. He was a gallant soldier in the Army of the Confederacy and fell wounded in the midst of the fiereest fighting in front of the Confederate Capital.


He was a lawyer of the very first order of ability. The "Old Alcalde" knew a lawyer when he saw him, and he made him a Judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals, and he left behind him in the records of that court opinions that will be to the bar and bench, unerring guides to legal truth when his bones are dust. He was equally at home in the field of the criminal and the civil law and was the peer of the ablest in either sphere. That can be said of comparatively few lawyers. At least such is my ex- perience. Judge Clark and Major W. M. Walton and A. W. Ter- rell and Leonard A. Abercrombie of Huntsville and W. L. Craw- ford of Dallas, are among the few names I can recall offhand, of men who were able and skillful in both lines of the profession. Judge Clark's profound knowledge of the principles of criminal law was best displayed on the bench where he put his conelu- sions into shape in faultless English, and sustained them by un- answerable reasoning. Unless my memory plays me false, he served under Governor Coke for a brief time as Secretary of State, rather as a matter of accommodation to the Governor than from any desire to hold the place. Later he was made Attorney General by Governor Coke-a place for which he was admirably fitted.


Judge Clark's father was a lawyer and for many years was Chancellor in one of the districts in Alabama where the juris- diction of the court was purely equitable. He was a plain, solid, able equity lawyer, without any frills or furbelows.


Judge Wm. P. Chilton of Montgomery who was for twelve years Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, once ap- peared before Chancellor Clark to argue an important case. They were warm personal friends. Judge Chilton was a great unele of Hon. Horace Chilton, if the genealogical record in my memory is correct, and was a cultured, scholarly man. In the course of his argument he said: "May it please your Honor, at this point I feel I can appropriately quote from that great poet, John Milton." However so able a lawyer and cultured a man as was Judge Chilton, could weave any part of Milton's im- mortal epic into an argument in chancery is difficult to under- stand, and it seems the old Chancellor had doubts about it, for he at once said: "Never mind, Judge, about those hethen




Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.