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Views on the War
    
        My mother, a history major in 1920, was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, as were her many brothers and sisters. One can probably assume that her parents felt the same way.   She enjoyed conversing with her husband's grandfather, that same R.T. Haile who, after wounds in the Confederate army and Federal imprisonment at Camp Douglas, watched his father die at Camp Chase.  He was articulate, so was she.  I would love to know what views the schoolteacher and the Confederate soldier might have exchanged on the War.  She could have asked how he felt about her hero, Lincoln. R.T. may very well have held an opinion about the president who led his rising industrial power against its own farming folk in defiance of the Founders' expressed sentiments and against the opposition of his own generals until he found some willing to wage total war on the populace, something new at that time. I wonder what views R.T. and Nell exchanged. Perhaps they followed the Good Lord's counsel, to "let the dead bury the dead."

      To me, it seems probable that adoration of Lincoln still precludes sensible judgment.  Obviously, long developing sectional differences had been stirred up by self-righteous hotheads on both sides, who could not foresee the consequences of their fervor.  The conduct of politicians, diplomats, and finally generals was judged from partisan perspectives.  How impossible discussion in balanced terms had already become before the War is illustrated by Daniel Webster’s 7th of March Speech in 1850. Precisely his attempt to speak to both sides outraged both against him. On issues taken to be moral ones, even-handedness is liable to be regarded as immoral.  In the end, those who had invaded, depredated, and emerged victorious were strongly motivated, and empowered, to prevail also in the interpretation of what they had done.

        Historians habitually connect the War with slavery.  Because of the rôle both white and black bondage played in our family's early years here, I have surveyed relevant literature.  The best balanced recent treatment I have been able to find (American Slavery 1619-1877 by Peter Kolchin, 1993) begins by explaining how slavery is universally encountered throughout history, then goes ahead to show how involuntary servitude in America developed out of voluntary (indentured) servitude.  Yet even this author from time to time convulsively grinds his teeth, as with the remark that slavery was "[r]ooted in the lust for profits" (p. 170), or with a quotation which calls the Old South "inseparable from the bourgeois world that sired it" (p. 173).  On historians' efforts to encompass slavery within shared American experience, this same author blandly writes, "The racism that suffused American scholarship during the first half of the twentieth century made it easy . . ." (p. 171).  It is fine to impute motives, or to apply Marxian economic theory to the past, but words like rooted and sired do suggest historical perspective.

        It is not surprising if this academic mileau honestly feels the War arose for the sake of the Negro slaves--despite Lincoln's many clear statements to the contrary.  Furthermore it is routine to represent the destruction as having benefited that population, despite the catastrophic suffering into which it plunged especially the Negroes, whether one consider their material condition and their relationship to the whites, or gauge how long their recovery took against the probable life expectancy of slavery itself, had the factions on either side been ignored, or controlled.  While such questions are necessarily speculative, Lincoln's rôle in precipitating and inexorably prosecuting an egregiously unequal and fratricidious war is not.  The Reconstruction amendments (for which he is admittedly not responsible) are also still represented in such a one-sided manner as to evoke skepticism in any calm mind.
A Few Texas Families before the War

        Prior to the great cataclysm, the major long-range concern of the nation had been with the consequences of Thomas Jefferson's great expansion of its borders to the southwest.  By some interpretations, his Louisiana Purchase extended to the Red River, by others all the way to the Rio Grande. This rapid transformation of the narrow tidewater nation had occurred during Amon Haile's boyhood.  Stephen F. Austin, born in the same year as Amon, 1793, brought settlers onto Mexican land grants in South Texas.  Another born in the same year was Sam Houston, whose Virginia family had become part of the great influx into Tennessee.  Amon witnessed Houston's rise to prominence in Nashville, as well as his ignominious fall from grace.  Houston wandered off to Arkansas, spent some years among his Indian brothers in Oklahoma, then seeing great promise in Texas, rode down across the Red River, Mexican territory attracting adventurers and ne'er do wells.  "Gone to Texas" had become a slogan during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, small farms were being established by southerners, mostly from Kentucky and Tennessee, but cotton planters also found east Texas black land profitable for their slave operations.  Sam Houston gained influence, especially after the Battle of San Jacinto (1836), site of his brilliant, total defeat of a much larger and better equipped Mexican army. In just a few years his new Republic of Texas had attracted so many immigrants from the United States that annexation was accomplished by 1845.

        Central Texas had been settled only as far as the Trinity, and that was dangerous territory.  In the same year of Texas Independence from Mexico (and of Arkansas statehood), the Parkers and some of their neighbors had been killed in a raid by Comanche Indians.  Cynthia Ann Parker, then nine years old, and her brother were taken.  It was one incident among many, but it was made notorious by Charles Goodnight's telling of Cynthia Ann's recapture in 1860.  She was by that time wife of one chieftan and mother of another. The Comanche had acquired horses from the Spaniards and become so expert, able to shoot arrows with great accuracy and rapidity from almost any position on or under their galloping mount, that they drove the notorious Apache out to New Mexico. West of the Trinity these accomplished warriors, horse and child thieves retained sway until the Civil War, and then withdrawal of Federal troops deprived settlers of their last protection.

        Those were the years when the Goodsons, the Cranks, and the McClures were crossing from out of the Carolinas through Alabama into southern Arkansas, perhaps all of them with vague hopes about Texas. They were small farmers, sometimes school teachers or Methodist ministers who also farmed.  During these boom years in cotton, such families found they could sell small holdings to the expanding cotton planters. Then they would move west, lured by the wonderful fertility of newground. The big cotton operations were moving with them, or ahead of them. They found the Red River bottom already committed to cotton, gins located up and down the River.

        As frequently happened in the backwoods, filled with menace and license, the McClure and Crank households intertwined.  Theirs was a joining of two separate Virginia cultures, the Tuckahoe (tobacco growing, horse racing, originally Anglican "cavaliers" of the tidewater) with the Cohee (Bible-quoting grain farmers with Presbyterian, Quaker, Baptist, Methodist, etc. faith).  Samuel McClure, frightened by Indian attacks, left Tinkling Spring first for South Carolina, then to Alabama. His children went on to Miller County, in the southwest corner of Arkansas.  We have seen how the Cranks, originally located just across the Rappahannock from the Hailes, moved further up the river. They too followed the Blue Ridge south and  ended up in Arkansas. Here Elisha McClure took Mary Crank to wife.  Two years later, his older sister married Mary's brother.  Then finally Elisha's younger brother chose Mary's sister.  The profusion of double cousins may tell us a lot about frontier life.  In this case we learn that after more than a century in America, the tidewater English were mixing with back-country Scots-Irish.

        Many families on their way to Texas had to pass through Miller County at the southwest corner of Arkansas.  From the South Carolina tidewater, the Goodsons ventured so far as the Grand Prairie, but turned back and settled  near present-day Sulphur Springs (the area which had attracted the Claiborns).  John Wesley Goodson returned back to Arkansas to file for a homestead in Miller County.  Their son married into the McClure / Crank clan.  Whether Cohee or Tuckahoe, these families were among the majority of white Southerners, who opposed slavery.  How they might have felt about the Confederacy, or about the War, is of course quite a different question.

        In the rich, malarial Red River bottom lived very few whites, but a vast Negro population planting, chopping, picking cotton. It was the same in my own youth, and is little changed even today, despite Emancipation. The Goodsons, Cranks and McClures farmed, preached, and taught school in the "hills." Some of  them crossed the Sabine River into the territory which had drawn Sam Houston.  Robert McClure established a tanyard in Shelby County, Texas.  His younger brother Daniel is also listed there in the 1860 census, as a merchant aged 27.   This is probably where Dan courted Martha née Crank, but their first child, Mary Elizabeth, was born back across the river, in Shreveport. The couple was not without means, or plans. Dan had already purchased, in 1860, a large tract of land far out in the Comancherìa where Cynthia Ann Parker had been lost.
The Wars in Texas

        The sparse settlement in that region was provisionally protected by a line of forts which ran right through the area where Dan and Martha had acquired their two and a half sections of prairie land in Palo Pinto County (not far from Charlie Goodnight's ranch).  Some twenty miles to the south lay Fort Blair, near present-day Desdemona.  In the very year of Dan's purchase, Abraham Lincoln was elected President.  Before he could take office, South Carolina seceded from the Union.  When Lincoln declined to surrender a federal fort, South Carolina took it.  Many clung to the hope that states like Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky would mediate a compromise.  Sam Houston, erstwhile president of of the Republic of Texas, now governor of the new state, opposed secession. When the federal troops were  mobilized and Lincoln invaded Virginia, the states had to choose a side.  Kentucky remained with the Union. There was terrible violence in Missouri.  The Texas legislature overrode their governor.  Houston interpreted their vote as returning Texas to her former independent status.  He predicted the disaster of secessen as had Daniel Webster before him. When he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy, it cost him the governorship.  The old man retired to cultivate his excellent skills in whittling.

        The populace was divided. From the liberal-minded Germans who had joined the Austin colony in the 1840s, a contingent of young men attempted to escape via Galveston to join Union forces, and were massacred by Tennessee boys. Most notorious was the town of Gainesville up on the Red River, where wealthy slave owners, in charge of the judiciary, summarily hanged forty-odd small farmers for allegedly conspiring to aid the Union. To this day, deep-seated prejudice all across north Texas goes back to this small farmer's resentment of slavery for its devaluation of labor, and for the ruthlessness of the slave-owning society. To the modern, enlightened question, "Should one not have sympathized with the slaves rather than blame them?" the poor white's reply would probably have been, "What kind of man is it who endures being enslaved?" As we have seen, this same redneck's people probably themselves had come to America bonded to servitude--as did many blacks--and felt himself the victim of forces far beyond his understanding. When I was a boy my father sold his tractor dealership in Texarkana and acquired another in West Texas.  A devoted employee followed him, and also helped out with our peanut farm.   After my father died, my management of the farm brought me into closer association with some of the farmers in the region.  Once when discussing old times with some of them I heard the story of how neighbors had come out into the field where the Negro was working, to persuade him that there were plenty of white boys who needed the work.  Frightened, he returned to Texarkana.  This had been in the 1950s.

        Certainly Martha Crank and Dan McClure had got in beyond their depth. Dan had signed up in the CSA army the previous spring, April 12th, 1862, but a child was coming.  My grandmother, Mary Elizabeth McClure (Mollie), was born in Shreveport on October 17th.  Dan took a "sick leave."  Again in May through August of the next year the Army reports him absent on sick leave "in Texas."  A second child is born on December 18th. Again after that birth, in the early months of 1864, army records show Dan absent in Texas with a "hip joint out of place."  Dan died shortly after Mollie's second birthday. A third child was born on July first of 1865.  Martha named him Daniel. Obviously, the war years had been eventful ones for the young couple. The 1870 census finds Martha Crank McClure with her three children back in Lafayette County, Arkansas.


        On file in the Palo Pinto, Texas Court House is record of the sale in Shelby County, Texas on July 30th, 1860 by Blackburn Pease of one third of his father's (Hiram Pease) Spanish head right grant of a league and a labor (=26 labors) to Daniel W. McClure for $500. Dan therewith received title to something over 1,500 acres just west of what is today the line between Erath County and Eastland County (later formed out of Palo Pinto). Also at Palo Pinto is record of Martha McClure's sale of the tract on August 18th, 1869.  She did this back in Shelby County, for $320 (considerably less than half Dan's purchase price, when one figures the wartime inflation).  I can report that I have walked out the tract of land Dan bought. It would make fair pasture, and may at some time have been farmed, but today it is dotted with oil wells. The sorry road running up Bear Creek to the confluence of Deer Creek and Jenny Creek is for heavy equipment only. I made it to the little Tudor Cemetery, where the markers are uninscribed pieces of sandstone or breccias. My guess was at the time that I was at Dan McClure's gravesite.
   
       We can read today how the Civil War era saw also the vicious culmination of the Indian Wars.  In 1860, the Sherman family in Palo Pinto County was tortured to death by a Comanche tribe.  Texas Rangers who pursued the Indians caught and slaughtered their women, but one squaw was captured--none other than Cynthia Ann Parker, now a matron with an infant daughter, Prairie Flower, at her breast.  One of her sons, Quanah, was in the escaped war party led by her husband, Peta Noconah.  During subsequent years, Quanah would continue attacks upon the sparse, decimated white families remaining in the Comancherìa.  Cynthia, returned to the Parker family, longed for Noconah and freedom.  She died in 1871, but her son went on to lead his tribe in the Red River War of 1874-75.  Eventually he surrendered them to live in the reservation at Fort Sill.

        As a child I heard the story of how, after Dan McClure had died "from a fall off a horse," and was buried in Palo Pinto, Martha with a child in her womb and two more in her covered wagon made her way back home to Arkansas.  She said she always pitched camp not too far from some homestead.  She was welcomed and protected by denizens of that scrub oak, mesquite and chaparral prairie.  The more prosperous blackland east of the Trinity was less perilous, but also less hospitable. She liked to tell how a great plantation house had received her in a less than cordial way. I believe the master said he was expecting guests, and that she could not camp out on his property. One can imagine that Martha, with her passel of children and probably some live stock (at least a cow and a calf, if her babes were to have milk), may have resembled strays from a gypsy band.  After ascertaining the boundaries of this elegant plantation, she bedded her young ones and hung out her laundry at a site most conspicuous from the plantation's front veranda. Such stories were frequently told to illustrate family character. Martha and Mollie and Nelly no doubt had a message for us.

         Times are much changed, of course, and our assumptions with them.  I suspect that the Cranks and the McClures, small farmers but with some means and education, shared deep-seated resentment toward cotton growers who had possessed not only South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, but now also the bottom land up and down the Red River.  Disputes over secession and over Texas' joining the Confederacy had made the rift most sharp and painful.  When Martha told of her spiteful trick on one of these prepossessing plantations it was no doubt received by an appreciative audience, who already knew her attitude and sympathized with her.  The tale may help understand why Martha's version of the family's whereabouts after 1862 contradicts the official Confederate Army records.  

        Whatever the young couple's motives for their wartime trek out into the West Texas Cross Timbers, that arid region must have offered little comfort to eyes for several generations accustomed to the big, cool woods, to fertile ground with plenty of rainfall, and out of every hillside a spring branch. Dan was probably good with an axe, perhaps a fair hand behind a plow, and knew how to bring home small game with his smoothbore muzzle-loader. The huge transition one had to make in order to survive out here in the land of the lariat, six-shooter, and windmill has been described in eloquent detail by Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Plains (Ginn & Company, 1931).  Webb's own family had left East Texas (Panola County, just above Shelby) a generation or two later than Dan's, and settled just one county west of Palo Pinto. Even with Webb's help, though, we would need a novelist's imagination to envisage the little McClure family on their journey from the Sabine across the Trinity, to the Brazos and beyond, over the chalk hills and the salt flats through the cactus and dense chaparral out to where the rainfall  seemed just to have given out. Their main worry, however, were the Indians. During the very months when the family was trying to survive out there, President Lincoln was recalling his troops from the Texas forts in order to launch his relentless attacks on the old homes of Dan and Martha in Arkansas, and on their families back in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia.  In Texas, the Comanche were in effect Lincoln's allies.


        The only point of agreement between Martha's story and that of the CSA is the account that Daniel W. McClure had "fallen off a horse." It strikes me that the easiest way to reconcile all the evidence requires us to discount army reports of Dan's illness.  I suspect that the sick leaves from the Confederate Army were occasioned by his newly acquired holding in West Texas (and the need to beget hands to work it). Daniel McClure's death may well have been a violent one. It did probably involve a fall from a horse.  What further details need a mother pass on to her eldest child, a two-year-old daughter?

       Is the above a photograph of Martha née Crank and her daughter Mollie McClure?  I have it from Mollie's much battered and worn scrap book of the kind beloved in those days, filled with pictures of the family, but also with clippings from periodicals of the day--anything particularly touching, especially little poems, and often embellished with the owner's effusively worded sentiments.  My own children, from a more laconic culture, chuckle at her.  How old are the women in the picture?  If they are Mollie and her mother, and that is a wedding ring on the girl's finger, then she may be nineteen or twenty, her mother in the middle forties.  Among the mementos is a little leather notebook, about 4" x 6 ⅟2 ".  The owner's name may be written on the inside back cover--:


--but my best guess is that "Mary E. McClure" has appropriated this notebook, and that the person who used it for school and household records during the years 1871-1876 (this little girl's ninth to fourteenth years) was Martha (who was thirty-six in 1871).  Among loose leaves tucked in is a scrap of a land transaction involving Daniel W. McClure, with mention of Louisiana and Texas.  This suggests that Mollie's little "coppy book" was originally her mother's.  Martha seems to have inaugurated the slim volume to record school attendance




but also tuition payments--often in kind--as well as provisions.  Her entries are usually neatly done in ink, but there is an occasional pencil note, as

                                        girls & boys playing together
                                        Sping [sparking?] at same time
                                        cursing swearing.

The document suggests that Martha was earning a living at a school not far from Holly Springs, if we compare her attendance lists with the grave stones at the cemetery:  Crank, Friday, Hutt, Roberson, Philyaw.  Martha left several pages blank, used some in later years for shopping lists.  After Martha finished with the notebook her daughter liked to use it for practicing her name,




        If Mollie was about fourteen when she took over her mother's notebook, then this "Charlie W. McClure" would be sixteen.  Charlie was Mollie's double cousin.  His parents, Elisha McClure and Mary Wooding Crank, had an older son named Capers, whose handsome portrait painted by Mollie's daughter Florence hangs in my dining room.  When the double cousins Charlie and Mollie married the brother and sister named Lizzie and Thomas Goodson, the once so separate Tuckahoe and Cohee cultures became almost incestuous.

        To recapitulate for a confused reader, Cranks (children of Samuel Cunning Crank & Christiana Colquett) had married McClures (children of William McClure & Sarah Susan Woodard):
                    Mary Wooding Crank          married       Elisha McClure                               
                    Robert Henry Crank            married        Martha Ann McClure 
                   Martha Elizabeth Crank        married       Daniel McClure                           
  In the next generation then, the double cousins--Charlie W., son of Mary Wooding and Elisha McClure, and Mary Elizabeth (Mollie), daughter of Martha Elizabeth and Daniel McClure--themselves married a brother and sister, Elizabeth and Thomas Watts Goodson.   Charlie and Elizabeth's son Herbert long maintained a dry cleaning establishment on State Line Avenue in Texarkana.

        Not very long after Martha and her children had made it back to the shelter of familiar piney woods, a young Haile passed that way out of Tennessee, headed to Texas.  By 1873, the Comanche Chief reports that "R. T. Haile" has arrived "from Arkansas";  By 1875, he is a founding member of the new Masonic Lodge. While moving up the Red River, R. T. and his Arkansas wife had worked for some years "on the shares," that being the new arrangement between land and labor so decried by authors like John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell.  In the third quarter of the twentieth century I was myself responsible for the productivity of land in Texas.  Still at that time sharecropping seemed somewhat tainted, and most farmers preferred to pay a cash rent in advance, even if that might be less profitable to them. 

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