The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 97, July 1993 - April, 1994 Page: 41
754 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Chicanery and Intimidation
Hamilton, after failing to get a new election ordered in Milam and
Navarro counties, narrowed his allegations of Radical Republican chi-
canery to Bexar (San Antonio), El Paso (present-day El Paso), and Hill
(Hillsboro) counties. Because election officials tabulated racial break-
downs of the vote only for and against the proposed constitution, it is
impossible to derive the actual minimum number of white men who fa-
vored Davis in Bexar, El Paso, and Hill counties. It is possible, however,
to estimate Davis's strength among white voters in these and all other
Texas counties by subtracting the number of blacks who voted in the
constitutional referendum from Davis's total vote. Although this method
assumes that all blacks who participated in the referendum balloting al-
so cast ballots for Davis (which is not an actual possibility), the resulting
figures nevertheless strongly suggest the minimum strength of Davis
among white voters in each county (see Table i) .9
Among the nineteen counties where Davis received an estimated one-
fifth or more of the ballots cast by white men, only Hill County is demo-
graphically anomalous (see Table 1). Located in the blacklands of the
north-central part of the state, Hill County neither contained significant
concentrations of foreign-born Texans (as did Medina, Kendall, Gille-
spie, El Paso, Zapata, Comal, Maverick, Bexar, Kerr, Wilson, Blanco, Pre-
sidio, Guadalupe, and Mason counties) nor shared geographical
proximity to Davis's home in South Texas (as did Nueces, Refugio,
Cameron, and Calhoun counties). The undocumented assertion by a
prominent historian that the Hill County ballot box was fraudulently
"taken into an adjoining county and counted by one member of the
board alone" cannot be corroborated, but additional qualitative evi-
dence confirms that the voters' intentions in the county were, one way
or another, fraudulently misrepresented.10 The villainy came to light in
Milam County because he regarded it as practically in a state of rebellion due to the disloyalty of
most of its white citizens. See James Oakes to Elisha M. Pease, Oct. 2, 1867, RG 301, Governors'
Papers: Elisha M. Pease (Archives Division, Texas State Library, Austin). On the Haller episode,
see reports of Wilham A. Cory to Charles E. Morse, July 5, 1869, Microfilm Reel #9, COCADT,
RG 393 (NA).
* Moneyhon, Republicanism an Reconstruction Texas, 124, 275-276 n. 50, uses the statewide,
rather than individual county, voting totals to generate an estimate of the minimum strength of
Davis among Texas white voters.
10 Hamilton charged in his letter to Joseph J. Reynolds, Dec. 21, 1869, Microfilm Reel #31,
COCADT, RG 393 (NA), that the Hill County ballots were counted by only one member of the
board of registrars, but said nothing about the ballot box having been "taken into an adjoining
county" (Ramsdell, Reconstruction in Texas, 284). Nevertheless, accounts circulated by the Hamil-
ton faction support the claim that the ballot boxes were taken away before the polls closed, sub-
sequently returned, and the votes then counted with the result mysteriously favoring Davis. See
the Dallas Herald, Jan. 15, 1870; and Weekly Austin Republican, Dec. 22, 1869. The most recent
scholarly analysis of Hill County during reconstruction accepts the 1869 result without question,
arguing that white support for Davis was "particularly strong in and around Hillsboro." Ricky
Floyd Dobbs, "'A Slow Civil War': Resistance to the Davis Administration in Hill and Walker
Counties, 1871" (M.A. thesis, Baylor University, 1989), 58.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 97, July 1993 - April, 1994, periodical, 1994; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117154/m1/69/: accessed May 7, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.