The 1870 Military Investigation into the Complaints against William Longworth, Radical Republican County Judge of Wilson County, Texas

The 1870 Military Investigation into the Complaints against William Longworth, Radical Republican County Judge of Wilson County, Texas Dale Baum (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Republican Ticket for justice of the peace, Precinct No. 3, Wilson County: William Longworth. Courtesy Texas State Library and Archives Commission. [End Page 32] In the wake of the emancipation of four million slaves at the end of the Civil War, the Republican Party made the first national effort to ensure that the Declaration of Independence's claim that all men are created equal became a political reality in the United States. Between 1865 and 1870, it passed three new constitutional amendments to protect the rights of and advance legal equality for freedmen. The result produced a potentially revolutionary remodeling of society based upon the participation of the newly freed slaves in southern life and a violent counter-revolutionary White backlash that eventually destroyed much, but not all, of what the period of Reconstruction had accomplished. In Texas, a majority of Whites subsequently regarded for generations the period as "one of the darkest pages in their state's history," in which vindictive and corrupt Republican opportunists and scoundrels ruled tyrannically under the arbitrary edicts of occupying forces of the United States Army. Presented here is a case study of William B. Longworth, an unfairly vilified Republican local politician, which illustrates the extent of how effectively current scholarship has retrieved a more accurate history of grass-roots Texas Reconstruction from the litterbins of the discredited myths, legends, and lore of enduring popular memory.1 Against all the odds, Long-worth [End Page 33] survived assassination by pro-Confederate terrorists and a trumped up military investigation into the ascendency of the multiethnic coalition that he successfully brought together. Upon the demise of Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas, his political opponents succeeded in falsifying for far too long the historical accounts of what occurred during Reconstruction in Wilson County. Born in Ireland and an immigrant to the United States by way of Canada, William Longworth was an anti-secessionist, wartime unionist, and Radical Republican who had lived in the South since 1846, first in New Orleans and subsequently in Bexar, Gonzales, Karnes, and Wilson Counties, Texas. He claimed to have spent most of the years after 1860 at the same postal address in Wilson County, but after 1862, he professed to have been "hunted and chased" by pro-Confederates, occasionally expecting not "to live beyond the day." His sale on commission of more than nine thousand pounds of wool to the Confederate Quartermaster-General's Department and two stints in the district court as a trial juror indicate his presence in Texas and commercial activity despite these threats. At age thirty-three, he fell within the limits for eligibility under the Confederate conscription law, but he most likely claimed ill health "from Pulmonary diseases," which caused breathing difficulties that made his working as a day laborer impossible to support his family. At the end of the war in the fall of 1865, Provisional Governor Andrew J. ("Jack") Hamilton appointed him county judge of Wilson County. In December, the Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency created to help ex-slaves make the transition from bondage to wage labor, appointed him its agent for Sutherland Springs.2 The Texas legislature on the eve of the Civil War had established Wilson County from land that had been primarily in Bexar County, the seat of which is San Antonio. The new county contained a large proportion of former bexareños, or Tejanos of ethnic Spanish and Mexican heritage, many of whom had ancestors who had arrived in the area in the early eighteenth century. At the end of the war, the county also contained a relatively small, but significant, percentage of African Texans, or recently emancipated slaves, whose Anglo American owners had brought them after the Mexican War into the Cibolo valley (principally in the towns of Lavernia and Sutherland Springs). By 1870, Blacks constituted 18 percent [End Page 34] of the county's total population, but among voters registered by the military they were 24 percent. Because they alone were never numerous enough to dominate local affairs, the...

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