Review: Lone Star by T.R. Fehrenbach

The Anglo-Celt Republic

Lone Star by T.R. Fehrenbach remains the most popular history of Texas among Texans. I had known of this book for years but was recently gifted a copy by a friend of mine in classical education. Now that I have lived in the Republic for most of my life, married a Texan, and raised my children as Texans, it was high past time for me to better understand my adopted state.

From Louisiana to Texas

I am a native of Louisiana, which shares some similarities but many differences with Texas. Louisiana, like Texas, has a unique state-level identity. Unlike the neighboring states of Arkansas and Mississippi, which identify more broadly with the Deep South, Louisiana leans into its French and Spanish heritage. Psychologically and culturally, Louisiana is essentially Latin American and famously so in its government and approach to politics. Our accents, especially those of us from the southern, Latin heart of the state, are discontinuous with the rest of the South. We talk fast, but mumble, perhaps from the influence of former French speakers. The residents of New Orleans, due to Irish immigration, can sound more similar to New Yorkers than Alabamians.

We knew Louisianans were technically a species of Southerner, but thought ourselves more sophisticated than the country-accented hicks from the broader South. Our attitude towards both religion and morality was more cynical, seeing in those who seemed overly enthusiastic as evidence of being a patsy, a rube, or maybe just from “North Louisiana,” i.e. a little too close to Arkansas. We knew politicians were corrupt, many preachers were hypocrites, and all men secretly seek their own gain even when pretending to serve the public good.

Louisianans are politically flexible above all; our resistance tends to the passive-aggressive. While Texans died to the man at the Alamo, New Orleans surrendered peacefully to the Union after the fall of the protective forts at the mouth of the Mississippi. During the occupation of the city, the people (and especially the women) made a habit of pouring chamber pots on the heads of Union soldiers and insulting them (not unlike the experience of visiting fans to an LSU home game), leading to the infamous General Order No. 28 by the Union commander Butler. My home parish was infamous for bushwhacking Union soldiers along a “highway of death” from cover, but offered little organized resistance.

Likewise, during Covid, Louisiana nominally had very strict lockdown protocols, but no one followed them. When I would visit family, hardly anyone in public places actually wore a mask, or else had it on with mouth and nose uncovered. A relative of mine, during the April 2020 lockdowns, continued getting haircuts from his barber. His reasoning: the barber was already his personal friend and they locked the door during the haircut so he technically wasn’t “open,” which made it all kosher according to Louisiana logic. No Bayou State resident was going to make himself a public martyr when ignoring Mickey Mouse laws is already a way of life. Only dumb, obstinate Texans looking for a public fight do that sort of thing.

And even though the statute of limitations is out, I probably shouldn’t mention how my Louisiana tax preparer (and distant cousin) advised me on my early Internet bubble stock profits - “since there’s no record it’s whatever you say it is to the IRS.” (For the record, I paid my taxes.) My Texan wife was shocked to hear that speeding tickets could be “fixed,” especially if one’s cousins worked at the courthouse. Only idiots and out-of-towners pay those things, and you’d be more ashamed for not helping out your cousin than evading the law. That we think it’s funny and aren’t really ashamed of it demonstrates the Latin grounding of the culture.

We do not, however, have the essential pride of Texans. Our state song, You Are My Sunshine, is a sentimental country radio hit from one of our colorful governors. Louisiana does not, like Texas, have a national anthem or pledge to the state flag, at least in practice. Texans do not think of themselves as Southerners, or necessarily even Americans. They are Texans first, an attitude unique among the states.

Fehrenbach explains that this identity is at the same time more provincial and historical than the American identity. America was founded not on an ethnic break with the mother country, but rather one of governing principles. Texas nationalism is more European than American, the end result of a bloody struggle for land, not principles, simple winners and losers in a material conflict. Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” contrasts dramatically with Travis’ Alamo cry of honest rebels facing the black flag of Santa Anna, of “God and Texas, Victory or Death.” Texas was founded not on the Enlightenment abstractions of men wearing wigs and stockings, but on old-fashioned blood and soil.

The End of Spain

From the glorious culmination of the Reconquista in 1492, the Spanish had expanded to the world’s largest empire. Because the Spanish lacked a colonizing impulse (and most importantly, a colonizing population), their pattern was to seize the wealth of their subjects to fund more conquests, along with limited migration of a core Spanish population to attempt to convert the natives with missionary work and intermarriage.

In Texas, the governments of Spain and then Mexico met the limits of their system against the fierce Plains Indians, first Apaches and then Comanches, who Fehrenbach insists were the world’s most effective horse-based warriors at the time. The Spanish settlements in Texas were constantly raided and were helpless to retaliate with small detachments of musket-bearing infantry. That the Indians ruled the land was evident in the practice of Spanish and Mexican settlements paying tribute to chieftains, gifts of food, horses, and manufactured goods to hopefully stay in their good graces and avoid the feared raiders.

At no time did the Mexican population of Spanish Texas exceed a few thousand, mostly along the Rio Grande. While technically a Mexican territory, their effective possession of the land was tenuous, which would lead them to the desperate measure of inviting Anglos to immigrate in a bid to hold Texas against American expansion from the east.

The Tragic Frontier

In Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, the first three major subtypes of English colonists are described: the aristocratic Virginians attempting to recreate Jane Austen’s feudal southern England, the Puritans from East England building their theocratic city on a hill in New England, and the egalitarian, pacifist Quakers in the merchant’s paradise of Pennsylvania.

All had struggled with Indian problems. Fehrenbach instructs the reader that American blindness on the Indian issue - the tendency to see one side as all good or all bad - is because Americans are too optimistic, idealistic, and unsophisticated to understand historical tragedy. The American use of the word “tragedy” as a synonym for sad or regrettable demonstrates this ignorance. Tragedy is man, despite his best intentions, getting swept up in his own flaws and irresistible forces beyond his control, leading to an inevitable, though theoretically avoidable, violent or ignoble end to a course of events. The whole point of tragedy is that there is no one to really blame; we are weak and sometimes unable to save ourselves as finite creatures.

The tragedy for the American Indians was twofold. On the one hand, they inhabited but did not possess their land. On the traditional libertarian basis, land is only morally possessed when it is improved and cultivated. This is a useful heuristic, but in a fallen world, incomplete. The actual basis of possession of any property is simply the ability to defend one’s possessions against others with lethal force, whether individually in a disorganized anarchy or through a social arrangement under the rule of law delegated to the state.

Simple moral rights through improvement are too idealistic, and recognizing the reality of violence underlying all civil society is my theoretical basis for seeing a republic limited to warrior suffrage as perhaps the most naturally stable form of government. Wealth alone cannot govern, because men are more equal in their killing than commercial capabilities, and men of wealth must always pacify the men of violence to be secure in their property. A government organized on the basis of one vote per individual capable of violence allows conflicts between property and liberty their best chance to be worked out peacefully, to minimize the potential energy of any revolutionary forces.

The Indians inhabited, with a few hundred thousand people, on a semi-nomadic basis, an empire of land capable of supporting hundreds of millions. They could not defend their land against a more organized civilization. As Teddy Roosevelt put it, was it realistic for America to remain a “wildlife preserve” for their people against a stronger, expansive population? To imply it should would require of the Americans a moral restraint never before seen in the history of the world, where the strong had always displaced the weak. That the Americans even attempted to negotiate peace treaties and boundaries was an act of virtue unknown to historical empires.

Nevertheless, the American Indians had a second problem: they were ungovernable by their own leaders. The parties to any treaty could not guarantee or enforce the things they were promising, because the rule of law was effectively non-existent among the tribes. No chief held sufficient authority to restrain raiding parties of ambitious young braves, and no cultural restraints shamed them for doing so. Inevitably, treaties would be broken by one side or the other, those who felt victimized would retaliate, and the whole bloody cycle would begin anew.

The Quakers, too clever by half, were religiously proscribed from attacking the Indians, yet desired to live in safety as they pursued their commercial interests. Their solution was to invite the violence-inclined Scots-Irish, the final English settlers before the revolution, to occupy the Appalachian frontier of Pennsylvania to serve as a buffer and do their dirty work for them. In doing so, they created their own problems of ungovernability.

The Indians and Scots-Irish both possessed what Nietschze called a “master morality,” a preference for death over slavery and submission, and a contempt for written laws and treaties unmoored from ground reality. The coming conflict could only end in victory or death for one or the other.

The Anglo-Celts

Fehrenbach describes the Scots-Irish most accurately as “Anglo-Celts.” Ethnically, they were lowland Scots subject to one thousand years of warfare along the Scottish border, until the crowns were united under James I. Since a raiding army burned their settlements nearly every generation, culturally they tended to a low level of civilization and preferred their wealth in portable livestock rather than land. With little assurance of peace, they organized themselves into their own tribes, or clans, for mutual self-defense. The English had used them before when they were recruited to Ireland as Presbyterian shock troops to pacify the native Irish Catholics and retain a beachhead in North Ireland for the Kingdom. Yet here they were abused by Anglican landlords for their non-conforming faith and jumped at the chance to emigrate to a new, virgin land.

Over a millennium, these native northern European people were shaped by war and insecurity into a sort of hybrid culture, both with the self-control to survive extreme northern climates but also a warlike fierceness, drive, and impatience. Fehrenbach places much weight on the theology of John Knox on liberating them from pietistic Christianity, making a final and clean break from the medieval Christianity of Europe that admired weakness, persecution, and inner spiritual purity over worldly concerns. I am not as familiar with Knox as I should be, but clearly, his influence and other factors manifested a Calvinist Christianity among the Scots distinguished sharply even from those, like the Puritans, who shared their exact theology in the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Knox and the Scottish Presbyterians arguably perfected covenant theology in actual practice. If the faith of the New Testament is the same faith held by Abraham, Moses, and Joshua, if God rewards the righteous with an inheritance of land, we can understand their expansionist and aggressive orientation towards New World Canaanites. Most of these fiercely independent Presbyterians would, in time, become Baptists, removing all vegistial outward authority over the local church, which itself exercised limited authority over the individual believer.

In the backwoods of the frontier, this group rapidly expanded, filling it from Pennsylvania into Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Fehrenbach speculates that they may have been the most fecund group in world history. They married young, loved children, and had as many as possible. Since families often lived miles from each other and drank from pristine Appalachian springs, feeding on the plentiful, highest-quality protein of wild game, they were insulated from the diseases of the denser settlements.

As a result, childhood mortality was extremely low as their large broods grew strong and tall, expanding exponentially into the vast wilderness. Their child-rearing practices, documented by Fischer, were the most sexually dimorphic, training boys to be willful, strong warriors while girls were formed to be obedient, dutiful wives and mothers. In this, they mirrored, in a more organized form, the warrior societies of the American Indians.

American Expansion

The straightforward narrative of American expansion to the Pacific, of “manifest destiny,” can be misleading. The American government, at nearly every historical moment, sought to restrain Westward expansion, for fear of conflict. They had, however, a tiger by the tail.

The Scots-Irish were ungovernable, not only individually, but as a people. Neither the Romans nor the English could govern them, and nor could the Eastern establishment. In The Winning of the West Roosevelt describes the typical pattern of orderly northern expansion. The government would clear a territory of Indians via treaty and/or military force, and settlers would move in to claim land grants, then apply for statehood. In the South, however, in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, settlers would move in first, fighting with the natives as necessary until the land was theirs. They expected no help from the central government other than to be left alone to conquer.

It is this group the Mexican government invited to settle and provide a buffer to the deadly and fearsome warriors of the Comanche.

Austin’s Colony

I have often observed that history is written like a bad allegorical novel. A land grant was given to the empresario Moses Austin, himself a New Englander who had migrated south. Moses, however, died before he could enter this promised land, leaving it to his son.

Fehrenbach emphasizes that Stephen Austin intended for his colony to be law-abiding citizens of Mexico. They were largely from the Planter South and motivated to build an agricultural civilization focused on wealth and land, not conquest. They were genteel and content to be left alone if Mexico would allow it. Austin latinized his first name to Estefan and generally kept the peace. He had the wisdom to select good land along the Brazos River away from any overly aggressive tribes. This disappointed the Mexican government which had hoped for a buffer population.

Following Austin, however, legally and illegally, were contingents of Scots-Irish adventurers seeking to settle the new land of Texas, and they regarded Mexican possession as about as meaningful as the Indian lands they had taken in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. My fellow Louisianans, during all this, were happy to facilitate illegal trade across the Sabine River and sell arms to the settlers. Some did immigrate before independence, but a plurality of the growing Texas population came further geographically from the Scots-Irish enclaves of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Over time, the instability of the Mexican government, and the Latin inability to understand Anglo-Celtic obstinance about their rights, led some of these settlements, though not Austin’s, to start ill-fated rebellions against the Mexican government. Austin, however, kept his original colony loyal and peaceful, petitioning the government for wrongs but never countenancing rebellion. But when the great Mexican nationalist Santa Anna came to power, he saw that the Anglo presence in Texas would forever prevent Mexican control of the territory. He rightly foresaw that they were, despite Austin’s personal loyalty, simply biding their time, growing in strength until they would declare independence.

Similar to the developments surrounding the Civil War, the great landowners were cautious about risking their capital in a war. But young hotheads like William Travis had other ideas. Determined to make a name for himself, he attacked a Mexican garrison at Anahuac and inflamed Santa Anna, who raised an army to cleanse Texas of its Anglo presence except under the most severe submission to his military dictatorship.

Austin himself had his attitude hardened when he was detained in a Mexican prison seeking redress from the government. He wrote after this experience, that “the great law of nature - self-preservation - operates, and supersedes all other laws … in all countries, one way or another, a few men rule society.” He began signing his letters by his English name, Stephen, once again.

Texas Independence

Santa Anna had demanded the immediate surrender of all Anglo Texans, under penalty of the black flag of putting down civil rebellion. Under international law, such measures against domestic rebels were perfectly legal. Yet, in doing so, he backed the Texians into a corner.

In a demonstration of generals’ tendency towards outdated war techniques, Santa Anna equipped his splendidly liveried troops with muskets. The Texans had always preferred Kentucky rifles. The American Revolution had shown the effectiveness of rifles against muskets more than fifty years prior, yet Mexican military doctrine had not evolved beyond lines of musketeers inaccurately firing in the general direction of enemy troops. The American rifle, however, caused bullets to rotate, correcting minor imperfections in their symmetry for a much more deadly effect.

Santa Anna lost one-third of his 2,000-man army against 200 rifle-bearing Texans at the Alamo. He fulfilled his promise of the black flag and hardened Texan resistance, as he continued pursuit of the ragtag Texas army led by Sam Houston.

Houston lacked the hotheadedness of many of his fellow Scots-Irish. Like the Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, he knew a weaker force must engage in strategic retreat, inflicting small losses on an advancing enemy that would eventually run out of supply lines and expose itself to an opportunistic counterattack. The essential Southern character flaws of honor at all costs, impatience, and fatalism caused the Confederacy to lose a winnable war* in three wasted invasions of the North, removing from command less aggressive commanders who preserved their troops for tactical opportunities.

* (Military tactics and technologies at the time favored defensive wars, and military doctrine held that an invader needed three times the troops of the defender to prevail. The ratio between North and South was 2:1, well within the parameters of a winnable defensive war.)

The politicians of the early Texas republic were likewise critical of Houston, demanding the avenging of their wounded honor with immediate attacks upon the Mexican army. Houston resisted such demands, but in a stroke of luck for Texas, before their impatience removed him from command such an opportunity arose in the swamps of San Jacinto just east of the modern-day city of Houston, to which he had retreated, step-wise, from the plains where the war had begun. The Mexican army was defeated, Santa Anna was captured, and Texas was its own nation.

The Republic

Texas was an independent republic for ten years. During the presidencies of Burnet and Houston, much effort was made for Texas to be annexed by the United States. But even Andrew Jackson, president at the time of Texan independence, was reluctant to grant the wish of his protege Houston because the US had signed a treaty with Mexico forever setting their boundary at the Sabine River and abiding by this treaty was important for the US’ reputation in international relations. The Washington government, even under a populist Scots-Irish Westerner like Jackson, was continually reluctant to expand westward. Eastern America had more land than could possibly be developed in 100 years, so why acquire more?

It was the Texas presidency of the ultra-nationalist Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar that forced Washington’s hand. Almost bankrupting the young republic, he engaged in military campaigns against both the Indians and the Mexicans, including an ill-fated expedition to “liberate” Santa Fe. He demonstrated that the Texas Republic was strong enough to assert itself against its enemies and downplayed the idea of annexation. Lamar’s vision was of Texas going it alone all the way to the Pacific Ocean. His campaigns and belligerence won the respect of the international community, leading the Republic to gain diplomatic recognition from both France and England.

Lamar spooked Washington. However limited his success against Mexico, he showed that Texas could defend itself and it became apparent that within a generation the young Texas republic could pose a challenge to the dominance of the United States, particularly if she pursued alliances with now-friendly European powers. A tide of American immigration for generous Republic land grants only meant Texas, now sovereign, would grow stronger.

When Lamar’s presidency ended and Houston was re-elected, he and his successor exploited Washington’s weakened negotiating position to achieve concessions upon admission as a state that could only be achieved by a sovereign nation with options. Texas retained the option to split itself into four states, but most critically, the state itself retained all unclaimed lands, whereas when a mere territory was admitted to the union, all public lands were retained by the federal government. The eventual discovery of oil on this land would make the state particularly rich, with Houston the first in a long line of wily Texas politicians who put the interests of the state first over the distant DC government.

The Mexican-American War

Shortly after annexation, the US found a pretext to declare war on Mexico over the southern border of Texas, after Mexico had repudiated the original treaty signed by Santa Anna setting the border at the Rio Grande. Mexico provoked its more powerful neighbor and found out what happens when you lose. Perhaps the last war fought in the true interest of the American people, it was predictably opposed by the Eastern establishment.

Thoreau’s hissy fit in Civil Disobedience was motivated in part by his desire to avoid service in such a just, quick, winnable, and decisive war that won the United States the most valuable real estate in the world, the Pacific coastline, including much of the Mountain West. That millions of New Englanders later eagerly volunteered to invade their own country in a much bloodier war of attrition showed that it was not pacifism that motivated them, but their own“leapfrogging loyalties.”

The Civil War

Sam Houston had tried to warn Texas from secession, not out of idealism but pragmatism. Fehrenbach tells how he warned that the people of the North were of a different quality than the foes they had faced before, equally as stubborn as them and more than capable of fighting to a costly conclusion. Hotter heads prevailed in Texas as they did across the Confederacy both before and during the war.

Texas and the broader South, however, did not learn from Mexico’s example of the dangers of a war with a stronger power. Realists like the fictional Rhett Butler were drowned out by belligerent southerners always eager and impatient for a fight. Lincoln, upon inauguration, was frozen politically. The secession of the lower South was a fait accompli and he lacked the political support for an invasion to stop it. Hot-headed South Carolinians, however, fired the first shots at Fort Sumter and gave Lincoln the bloody shirt he needed to raise an army.

Further southern impatience to win quickly revealed that Lincoln had bet correctly: the South was not a nation, but rather a regional economy that lacked the cohesion to fight and win a protracted defensive war. Jefferson Davis, who had opposed secession almost to the end, became a tragic figure trying to impose functional nationalism upon a divided South. Months into his presidency, he was condemned by his own Vice President, Alexander Stephens, as a tyrant worse than Lincoln for daring to impose measures such as conscription to prosecute the war. The elites of an anachronistic, feudal society did not at first realize they were fighting the first modern, total war. That the Confederacy survived four years despite a lack of unified government is a testament to the quality of the underfed, underclothed Southern soldier and his military leaders.

A microcosm of this can be seen in the Georgia campaigns of Sherman and Joseph Johnston. Johnston had retreated from Tennessee to Atlanta in the face of Sherman’s larger forces, punishing the Union army with greater losses and drawing them further and further from their supply lines and more vulnerable to an eventual decisive counterattack. When Johnston was forced to abandon Atlanta, the honor of the South was wounded, and he was removed from command and replaced by the Texan John Bell Hood.

Hood proceeded to abandon the defense of Georgia and swing around Sherman’s army on an ill-fated reinvasion of Nashville, Tennessee. Unopposed, Sherman proceeded on his famous “March to the Sea,” burning and pillaging the southern interior. Southern honor culture, which made a strong distinction between warrior castes and the general population, had proscribed the same tactics against Northern civilians while Sherman, declaring “war is hell,” saw cruelty against the civilian political supporters of the war as a tactic to save lives and bring it to a swifter conclusion. Ultimately, the hot-headed Texan Hood did more to help the US Army than any of its own officers, which is why it made perfect sense to eventually name its largest military base after him.

Jefferson Davis, before he was captured fleeing west in Georgia, was intent on continuing the struggle in Texas. Far from the strategic theater of the war, the state had successfully frustrated Union occupation efforts. Decisive battles were won retaking Galveston, and 45 Irish immigrants with cannon were able to repel a force of 5,000 invaders at Sabine Pass. The final major battle of the war was a Texas victory near Brownsville on parts of the King Ranch, as a coalition of Rangers and cowboys forced a retreat of occupying forces into the sea. Texan pride was preserved by these victories but could not change the inevitable outcome. On June 2, 1865, General Kirby Smith, the commander of the Trans-Mississippi, surrendered the last major Confederate army aboard the U.S.S. Fort Jackson in Galveston Bay.

The Winning of the Frontier

Part of Texas’ frustration with the US government was the terrible state of the frontier. Both before and especially after the war, the Scots-Irish who had flooded into the state for cheap land were subject to continual raids by the fearsome Comanche. Disorganized, ungovernable bands of raiders, answering to no central chief, would spring upon settlements, stealing horses, women, and children, inflicting unspeakable tortures upon their victims. The best horsemen in the world, they had perfected a type of warfare perfect for the plains, where they had committed merciless genocide upon the previous Native American inhabitants, and suppressed the mighty Spanish Empire into a defensive posture. Now they fully intended to do the same things to the Texian settlers.

Fehrenbach tells us how the Texan had to brutalize himself to fight such an enemy. Since the Comanche were nomadic, there were no strategic targets in such a war other than the people themselves. Their rifles were useless against highly mobile, hit-and-run raids where a man’s livestock and family would be stolen, murdered, or carried off in minutes before he could return from the fields and organize with his neighbors for mutual defense.

The only solution to the Comanche problem was retaliatory raids. This meant close-up combat on horseback, with new offensive technology, the Colt revolver, and the bloody work of the hatchet and sword. The state organized its own force, the Texas Rangers, to do the dirty work of taming the frontier. Fehrenbach, who admirably refuses to insert his own moral opinions into the narrative, is unflinching in describing this as a bitter war of annihilation.

It is easy from our life of modern ease to judge what the Texans had to do to claim the land. We are soft and weak compared to what these people endured. Theodore Roosevelt attempted to explain to the more civilized East what they faced in The Winning of the West:

The excesses so often committed by the whites, when, after many checks and failures, they at last grasped victory, are causes for shame and regret; yet it is only fair to keep in mind the terrible provocations they had endured. Mercy, pity, magnanimity to the fallen, could not be expected from the frontiersmen gathered together to war against an Indian tribe. Almost every man of such a band had bitter personal wrongs to avenge. He was not taking part in a war against a civilized foe; he was fighting in a contest where women and children suffered the fate of the strong men, and instead of enthusiasm for his country's flag and a general national animosity towards its enemies, he was actuated by a furious flame of hot anger, and was goaded on by memories of which merely to think was madness.

His friends had been treacherously slain while on messages of peace; his house had been burned, his cattle driven off, and all he had in the world destroyed before he knew that war existed and when he felt quite guiltless of all offence; his sweetheart or wife had been carried off, ravished, and was at the moment the slave and concubine of some dirty and brutal Indian warrior; his son, the stay of his house, had been burned at the stake with torments too horrible to mention*; his sister, when ransomed and returned to him, had told of the weary journey through the woods, when she carried around her neck as a horrible necklace the bloody scalps of her husband and children; seared into his eyeballs, into his very brain, he bore ever with him, waking or sleeping, the sight of the skinned, mutilated, hideous body of the baby who had just grown old enough to recognize him and to crow and laugh when taken in his arms.

Such incidents as these were not exceptional; one or more, and often all of them, were the invariable attendants of every one of the countless Indian inroads that took place during the long generations of forest warfare. It was small wonder that men who had thus lost every thing should sometimes be fairly crazed by their wrongs. Again and again on the frontier we hear of some such unfortunate who has devoted all the remainder of his wretched life to the one object of taking vengeance on the whole race of the men who had darkened his days forever. Too often the squaws and pappooses fell victims of the vengeance that should have come only on the warriors; for the whites regarded their foes as beasts rather than men, and knew that the squaws were more cruel than others in torturing the prisoner, and that the very children took their full part therein, being held up by their fathers to tomahawk the dying victims at the stake.

…

* The expression "too horrible to mention" is to be taken literally, not figuratively. It applies equally to the fate that has befallen every white man or woman who has fallen into the power of hostile plains Indians during the last ten or fifteen years. The nature of the wild Indian has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot look another in the face and so much as speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out—these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others equally normal and customary which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims.

The Texans, alone among American states, were left on a hostile frontier to fend for themselves. During the four years of the Civil War, Fehrenbach reports that the frontier moved back 100 miles, and the Comanches were not fully destroyed until the 1870s.

The northern establishment was convinced Indian brutality was exaggerated and enraged the Texans by placing Quakers in charge of Indian reservations in Oklahoma. As is so often the case, idealists far away from the consequences of their ideas like to judge those doing their best on the ground to deal with a problem.

The “Society of Friends” provided a base of refuge for Indian raiders, making excuses for them and refusing justice when Texas forces demanded extradition. It was the bitter realist General Sherman, redeployed to Texas after the war to assess the Indian problems, who was finally convinced the Texans were right after seeing the aftermath of raids with his own eyes. Military units under his command quickly finished off the Comanche.

The Texan Ethos: Blood and Soil, Beef and Oil

Fehrenbach devotes less of his book to the 20th century, as the Texan character was defined in the 19th century by two things that haven’t changed: a love of fighting and a love of the land. Much of Texas politics from 1876 to the oil boom was consumed by the struggles of farmers to make a living on marginal land between the prairies and desert, amidst an overall decline in the economics of farming. Mechanization and improved agricultural methods undermined the viability of the family farm. Food and cotton became cheaper and cheaper while small farmers held on way too long.

Texans remained, through the 20th century, the most militaristic of the states, serving in the armed forces at rates far exceeding their share of the population. Like the broader South, it was eager to fight any foe, foreign or domestic, and many former Confederates eagerly volunteered for the Spanish-American War; Theodore Roosevelt famously recruited his “Rough Riders” battalion at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. They were fierce in battle but magnanimous in peace to defeated foes. After WWII, Texans were more prone to agree with General Patton in quickly rehabilitating the Germans as allies against the USSR, for, as Fehrenbach puts it, they knew what it meant to have “committed the unforgivable sin of losing a war.”

These two essential Texas characteristics are joined at the hip. Those who are newly rich in the state are often led to acquire a large ranch or property, and a large collection of weapons to demonstrate at least some martial orientation. Likewise, Fehrenbach reports the frequent self-imposed humiliation of various Texas heroes who, despite their victories in battle, felt embarrassed that they never acquired wealth in land. The central virtues are strength and wealth.

Fehrenbach speculates that the open skies along the “cross timbers” line, where the Piney Woods give way to prairie and then to desert, awakened something long lost in the Anglo-Celtic soul. The ethos of the state is centered here, and Central and West Texans who leave the Big Sky for eastern forests never feel quite at home.

The primordial genesis of the Germanic peoples occurred when tall, light-skinned, dark-featured horse warriors from the steppes of the Caucasus began, with the earliest known chariots, to conquer, subdue, and mix with shorter indigenous, largely blonde and light-eyed European farmers. These Caucasians dismounted from their horses and partially domesticated themselves in the forests of Europe. In their westward expansion, they had mostly farmed in a continuous forest over thousands of years from the eastern edges of greater Germany to beyond the Mississippi River. Yet in Texas first and then the broader American West, European man expanded once again past the tree-line, looked to the far horizon, took up his horse, defeated a worthy and skilled opponent, and rediscovered his wild, ancient nature.

Note: the photo above is not Texas, but the Eurasian steppe in Ukraine.

The great Texan weakness is common to warrior cultures, in that the traits that make for conquerors tend not to be those common to innovation. The state’s frontier success was dependent on the Yankee inventor of the revolver, and its natural resources were largely developed by out-of-state interests and technologies. Texans are stereotypically practical and anti-intellectual, which is protective much of the time, but often means thought leadership comes from outside the state.

The discovery of oil at Spindletop in 1901 made many Texans rich but did little to change its essential character. Oil wealth was simply land wealth, which had always served as the social basis of the state. A Texan measured wealth in acreage and heads of cattle, not Yankee dollars, and the appending of barrels of oil production was nothing new. It resulted in more Texans achieving their ideal: aristocratic wealth based on land and insulated from grubby politics and merchandising. They were “first-rate fortunes” according to the taxonomy of Dumas.

Winning Is Everything

The pantheon of Texas heroes is still awaiting cancellation, yet Leftists in the state are mostly silent. Qualitatively, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Sam Houston and Robert E. Lee; both were Southern men of their time who practiced slavery. Why has the latter been canceled of late while the former remains untouched?

One big part of the answer is that Houston won. Winning in history is everything, it turns out. As Patton told his troops, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.” Why is this?

The average person has very little ability to parse moral or ideological arguments. Every loser in history has a rationale for why they lost and why it was “wrong” for them to lose. Hundreds of different losers all make the same argument, and it’s much simpler for a simple person to apply a filter of outcomes. The winners are, on average, more virtuous than the losers, and the average person has zero power to right historical wrongs and must operate their daily lives in the moral systems constructed by the winners anyway. It’s just psychologically easier not to carry around the burden of historical special pleading.

So Texas is more resistant to cancellation because Texas won her independence, and only gave that up under her own terms. This is probably why of all the former Confederate states, Texas has been the most successful, because Texans had a winning identity that transcended the Lost Cause* mythology which crippled much of the broader South with a backward-looking nostalgia.

* (Interestingly, the men who actually fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War encouraged their countrymen to move on, accept they were a conquered people, and lean into a broader American identity. A sizable minority of former Confederate generals became Republicans after the war. For men, whatever the nature of the dispute, blood settled it, and men move on quickly when a conflict is over. Across the South, however, many of the hundreds of memorials erected in the late 1800s and early 1900s extolling the Lost Cause were sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. However much these men wanted to move past a losing conflict, their daughters wanted to honor them. There’s something bittersweet in that.)

The lesson in this suggests a modification to just war doctrine: the risks of losing are so great that victory ought to be nearly certain, not simply plausible because losing can mean the complete demoralization of the people who lose for a century or more. It further suggests that in politics or wars, small wins are everything in building momentum. Purity spirals and making the perfect the enemy of the good have no place because the worst thing possible is to lose and to be forced to act like a loser making arguments instead of showing results. Rhetoric should focus on showing one’s enemies to be losers, not just evil.

Second, and I think just as significant, is that Texans have a self-concept that accepts and honors the conquest of the land. On some level, Texans know their ancestors were warriors and killers who took the land from others and they’re ok with that and at least a little bit proud of it. That the Left in the state perceives this means the cancellation campaigns don’t even get off the ground. If one’s enemies think they can even start the discussion of undermining one’s history and heroes, it’s a sign of weakness.

Texans, then, are morally hardened against Leftist guilt trips. What Fehrenbach called their “brutalization” - their realization that their struggle on a hostile frontier was to kill or be killed - is adaptive and protective. Even today, a majority of Republican primary voters support a referendum on Texas independence.

For the West generally, which has yet to be conquered by arms, the Achilles heel is a willingness to feel guilty for winning the great contests of history, for finally conquering the world circa 1900. The same abstract thinking that enables great enterprises and unlocking the secrets of nature also seems to make Western cultures uniquely vulnerable to the special pleadings of sore losers.

Texas, so far, is gloriously different.