Reconstruction

“The Eleventh Texas Legislature met on August 6, 1866, and Throckmorton took office six days later. The governor’s efforts at securing recognition were hindered by the many former secessionists who dominated the legislature. These men selected two prominent secessionists, O. M. Roberts and David G. Burnet, for seats in the United States Senate. The legislature’s actions attempted to return the state as much as possible to the status quo ante bellum. They refused to ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments. The members also enacted “black codes,” a series of measures designed to regulate black labor through apprenticeship, contract labor, and vagrancy laws. These labor laws appeared to Unionists in Texas and Republicans in the North to be an attempt to establish a new form of slavery. Such activity convinced even those Unionists who had not remained outside the conservative coalition that the former Confederates were back in control and unrepentant. It raised similar doubts in the minds of the local military commanders, the assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the members of Congress. Neither the senators chosen by the legislature nor the congressmen elected by Texas voters were allowed to take their seats in Washington. Throckmorton himself increased tension by his complaints against the army for interfering in civil affairs and in his efforts to protect the frontier from Indian raids by fielding ranging companies. Throckmorton believed that the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau meddled unreasonably in civil affairs and that the army was not doing its duty on the frontier. In turn, military officials and Unionists believed that Throckmorton, relying on local justice, had brought about a situation in which die-hard Confederates persecuted and even murdered blacks and Unionists without punishment. They also feared that the governor’s rangers were intended as a political organization to block Reconstruction as much as to fight Indians.”

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mzr01

James W Throckmorton – 12th Governor of Texas served from 1866 to 1867 during the beginning of Reconstruction

Mathew Brady – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04217. CALL NUMBER: LC-BH832- 297 <P&P>[P&P]

Status Quo – The existing state of affairs, the way things normally were

Antebellum – Occurring or existing before the American Civil War

Unionists – People loyal to the United States, the Union