Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Leader
Texas history has not treated Edmund J. Davis kindly. In the eyes of the early historians of Reconstruction era in Texas, Davis touched pitch as the leader of the state’s triumphant Unionists and their despised Republican Party and was thereby forever tarred. Carl Moneyhon’s new biography calls the traditional view of Davis into question but fails short, in this reviewer’s estimation, of totally rehabilitating Davis’ historical image. Nothing in Davis’ background or upbringing portended his future alienation from mainstream Southern politics of the mid-19th century. The son of a South Carolinian father, Davis was born in Florida in 1827 and lived there until immigrating to Texas in 1848. Davis settled permanently in South Texas where he joined the bar, became active in Democratic politics and received an 1856 appointment to the state bench. He moved away from the Democratic Party in the years leading up to the Civil War, and he opposed secession. After refusing to take an oath in support of the Confederacy, Davis resigned his judgeship. In May 1862 he fled Texas and eventually accepted a commission in the Federal army as colonel of a regiment of other Texas refugees from the Confederacy, the First Texas Cavalry (U.S.). The Achilles’ heel of Moneyhon’s biography is that nothing remains of any of Davis’ private correspondence — as the author candidly admits in the preface. The upshot is that Moneyhon can only speculate as to why Davis turned away from conventional Southern Democratic politics in the run-up to the war or pursued some particular political policy after the war. Until future historians lay hands on Davis’ journals or other private papers, he is destined to remain something of an enigma. Davis rose to the rank of brigadier general during the war, but his service was confined to the backwaters of the Trans-Mississippi Theater. Moneyhon’s account of Davis’ military career is confined to a single chapter. If a reader’s prime interest in Davis is his Civil War service, this is not the book for him. The bulk of the text covers Davis’ career in Texas politics after the war. And quite a career it was. Running on a Republican ticket, Davis squeezed out a victory in the 1869 gubernatorial election. During the brief period that his party held the upper hand in the Texas legislature much of Davis’ ambitious legislative agenda was enacted, including the establishment of the rudiments of Texas’ first public school system. As governor, Davis was justifiably wary of the railroad interests that sought support from state government, and no hint of scandal emerged from his office. However, Davis blunted his force with vindictive public positions, such as backing the disfranchisement of former secessionists and the so-called “ab initio” law, which would have invalidated all Texas laws passed during the Civil War and arguably opened a Pandora’s Box of unintended legal consequences. When Davis failed to win re-election in 1873, he returned to the practice of law. He remained active in state and national Republican politics until late in life. But by the time of his death in 1883, Davis was thoroughly embittered with the national Republican Party for its lack of support of the Southern GOP and resigned to the fact that Democrats had regained control of state and local government in Texas. Despite laboring under the handicap of the disappearance of Davis’ private papers, Moneyhon systematically researched his topic, as his extensive endnotes and bibliography attest. The author writes well, and his familiarity with postwar Texas is manifest in his book. Readers with an interest in Reconstruction area politics in the South, in general, and in Texas, in particular, will enjoy this biography.
Reviewer: C. Michael Harrington C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard
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