Goddess of Anarchy Read online

  PART 1

  AN ENDURING CIVIL WAR

  Chapter 1

  Wide-Open Waco

  ONE DAY IN LATE 1873 A YOUNG MARRIED COUPLE BOARDED A train and left—or, more accurately, fled—the small town of Waco in Central Texas, desperately hoping to make a new life for themselves in Chicago. The wife and husband seemed an unlikely pair—she a seamstress, formerly enslaved, age twenty-two, named Lucia Carter, he a Republican Party operative and journalist, formerly a Confederate cavalryman, named Albert Parsons, twenty-eight. They knew all too well that their love was forbidden—for a white man and a black woman in the nineteenth-century South, such a relationship came with the threat of mortal danger.1

  Lucia was leaving family behind in Waco—her mother and two younger brothers—as well as an industrious freedman named Oliver Benton, formerly known as Oliver Gathings, the presumed father of her deceased infant son. As she moved north she also abandoned her identity as a former slave, changing her first name from Lucia to Lucy, and her surname from that of her stepfather to that of her husband. From this point forward, she would refuse to let her fourteen years as a slave define her or limit her life possibilities. Their names and careers forever and inextricably linked, she and Albert would soon achieve worldwide fame—and infamy—as anarchists bent on destroying the political and economic foundations of the United States.

  They were a striking couple, turning heads wherever they went: Albert slight, trim, and dapper, with prematurely gray hair covered by bootblack, and a carefully trimmed mustache in the English style; Lucia tall, with wavy black hair. She carried herself with a dignified, even haughty bearing, impressing those who met her with her striking good looks, keen intelligence, and fashionable clothing.

  The couple’s life together began in a high-prairie town situated on the banks of the Brazos River, a place marked by and destined for intergroup bloodletting. Waco was founded in 1849 in McLennan County on a site once occupied by the Waco and Tawakoni Indians. Another tribe, the fierce nation of the Comanche, persisted in efforts to reclaim their stolen territory in the vicinity of the settlement as late as 1860. Beginning in 1861 and over the next four years, Waco welcomed slaveholders from all over the South who were determined to “refugee” their human chattel out of the reach of both Union forces and Confederate impressment agents. The liberation of the slaves in 1865 entailed the destruction of nearly half the county’s real property value. After the Civil War, a defeated but still heavily armed white male populace carried on a regional tradition of protracted fighting against successive real and perceived enemies—the Comanche, the Mexicans, the government of the United States, and now freedpeople, Republicans, and soldiers of the occupying Union Army. The county achieved a dubious distinction for how completely civil authority broke down there. Vicious, unprovoked attacks on freedpeople marked a level of lawlessness extreme even for Texas.

  Waco’s unsettled nature proved conducive, however, to transgressive behavior and relationships. The town’s merchants supplied goods and services to the area’s sheep ranchers, corn and wheat farmers, and cotton planters and to the cattlemen driving their massive herds north to Wichita along the Chisholm Trail. The central plaza was dominated by the offices of men who owned businesses based on credit and land and traded in cotton, grain, hides, wool, and flour. But the plaza was also the site of sporadic and at times deadly gunfire. As in the prewar era, the sons of the planter elite were in the habit of “shooting around the square and riding and whooping,” evading arrest and otherwise having “a little fun,” in the words of a local historian. Meanwhile, the many brothels clustered in a nearby red-light district housed dozens of prostitutes, which authorities discreetly referred to as “actresses.” Waco was a wide-open town, trafficking in desires of all kinds.2

  Periodically, local law-enforcement authorities would bow to the pressure of indignant preachers and make sweeps of bigamists, bootleggers, owners of “disorderly houses” (brothels), and enthusiasts of Chuck Luck and other games of chance. Hauled into court, prostitutes, such as Mollie Davis and Frogmouth Lou, among others, would stand trial only to be declared innocent by a jury of twelve men and released to ply their trade until the next raid. Much as the town fathers might rail against sin—the card sharp fleecing the wide-eyed farm boy, the couples living together out of wedlock—this farce of catch and release persisted. In reality, the store owners and other purveyors of goods and services relied upon the business of gullible field hands and cowpokes.3

  In the early 1870s, a brief period of Republican local and state rule seemed to hold out the possibility that Lucia and Albert could in fact live together in Waco safely as husband and wife. A small number of black and white reformers touted a new “social equality” that signified consensual interracial sexual relations as well as legal marriage, and the couple took advantage of this window of opportunity to marry legally in a state dominated by white supremacists. Albert seemed to have ahead of him a promising, even lucrative career as a political organizer and speaker—and perhaps an elected public official—in the service of the party of Lincoln. However, by 1873 a reenergized neo-Confederate Democratic Party had regained control of the state’s political machinery via the ballot box. The Parsonses’ move to Chicago in late 1873 was thus a forced relocation reflecting their diminished opportunities as well as the persistent danger they faced in Central Texas. Yet the Waco years profoundly shaped the couple’s lifelong roles as antagonists of the rich and powerful. Indeed, in any number of ways their time in Texas presaged their later life outside it—from their commitment to ideas as agents of radical change to their ability to remain unflinching in the presence of those who despised and feared them.

  FROM THEIR RESPECTIVE BIRTHPLACES IN ALABAMA AND VIRGINIA, Albert Parsons and Lucia Carter had traveled separate, circuitous paths to Waco, paths forged in the upheaval of mass migrations, civil strife, and the destruction of slavery. Albert Richard Parsons was born on June 20, 1845, in Montgomery, Alabama. His forebears were among the first settlers of New England. Later in life he would invoke his distinguished ancestors, including Congregational clergy and Revolutionary War heroes, as evidence of his thorough Americanness. His father, Samuel Parsons, a native of Maine, had owned a grocery store and shoe and leather factory in Montgomery; together with his wife, Hannah, they had had ten children. Both parents had died by 1850, and Albert was sent to Tyler, Texas, in Smith County, in the northeastern part of the state, to live with his brother William H. Parsons, who was nineteen years his senior. William had fought with the 2nd Dragoons under General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War, when the United States wrested huge swaths of territory from Mexico to expand its southern border. Trained as a lawyer, William edited a newspaper, the Tyler Telegraph, from 1851 to 1853, and he took an early interest in Texas Democratic politics. Between 1855 and 1860, he moved his household three times in a southwesterly direction, to Johnson County, then Hill, then McLennan. Albert had fond memories of his own childhood “on the range,” where antelope and buffalo lived in abundance. As he later wrote from his jail cell, “My frontier life had accustomed me to the use of the rifle and the pistol, to hunting and riding, and in these matters I was considered quite an expert.”4

  In 1859, Albert, then fourteen, went to live in the village of Waco with his nineteen-year-old sister, Mary, who had married a wealthy merchant. William probably wanted Albert to attend school, which he did for a year. Around this time, William settled his family nearby on a parcel of land on Waco Creek. An avid proponent of southern independence, William published a periodical called South West that advocated a reopening of the African slave trade, an extreme position even for the most rabid of late antebellum pro-slavery ideologues. The paper was, in the words of a contemporary, “so hot for secession it had to be handled with a pair of tongs.” William also planned to write a book titled “Negro Slavery, Its Past, Present, and Future.” Considering his stern defense of “the purity of blood and supremacy” that he said marked whites as �
�a distinct race,” he could hardly have anticipated the day when he would be the brother-in-law of a former slave.5

  The William Parsons household contained only one enslaved worker, “Aunt Easter,” whom William’s wife, Louisa, had brought to the marriage. In 1860, Easter was fifty years old and worth $800 on the market for human flesh. By this time the state had a total population of 604,215, of whom 182,566 were enslaved persons and only 355 free blacks. (In contrast, Virginia, with a population of 1,596,318, was home to 490,865 enslaved persons and 58,042 free blacks.) Slaveholdings in Central Texas amounted to a value of $2.7 million, more than the value of the region’s land.6

  Texas was a perennial magnet for southern planters seeking to take advantage of cheap, fertile land suitable for cotton cultivation in the eastern and central part of the state, and among these slave owners was James J. Gathings. Born in 1817 in South Carolina, Gathings and his two brothers had established a plantation near Prairie, Mississippi, in 1839. The enslaved workers they purchased there included Clara Gatherus and her son Oliver (later called by whites Oliver Gathings), who was born in 1832. As an adult, Oliver, by then known as Oliver Benton, would believe himself to be the father of Lucia’s first child, and he would consider her his wife. In 1849, the Gathings brothers uprooted their bound workforce of thirty and moved them to Hill County, Texas. After the war, James exemplified the virulent resistance to emancipation and Republican rule that characterized much of Anglo Texas.7

  The state’s large and powerful slave-owning class overwhelmingly supported disunion. A special February 1861 convention passed a secession ordinance by a vote of 166–8, and, unlike their counterparts in most other states, the fire-eaters submitted the question to the voters, who approved it 46,153 to 14,747. This tally underestimates the opposition, however, as some state residents who had been born in Mexico and Germany did not vote, fearing violence should they attempt it, and other men declined to participate in an election they considered unconstitutional, or at least ill-advised. Moreover, support for secession did not necessarily indicate support for the institution of slavery, since some secessionists were seeking only to protest the federal government’s apparent failure to quell persistent Indian raids on white settlements throughout the state.8

  McLennan County voted 586 to 191 for secession, a decisive victory. Soon after hostilities commenced in April, 900 men from the county (out of a total population of 6,200) volunteered to fight on behalf of the newly formed Confederate States of America. Together they composed seventeen companies consisting of both cavalrymen and infantry. In October 1861, William H. Parsons raised a regiment in Waco, the 12th Texas Cavalry, and with his troops set out for Arkansas. During the war he would serve as both a regimental and brigade commander.9

  Albert Parsons was not in Waco during the great torchlight parades that gave rousing send-offs to local troops in 1861. The year before, William had arranged for him to serve as an apprentice—a “printer’s devil”—for the publisher Willard Richardson, owner of the Galveston Daily News. Albert found Galveston to be a cosmopolitan place, where he, in his own words, grew from a “frontier boy into a city civilian.” The Richardson household consisted of the publisher’s family and also a clerk, three printers, and five apprentices, natives of Ireland, Germany, New York, Missouri, and Louisiana, all working in an impressive four-story building befitting the paper’s political influence. While Albert learned his craft, he also learned about state politics, for under Richardson’s direction the Daily News served as a decidedly pro-southern chronicler of the momentous events of the time. Thus began Albert Parsons’s lifelong engagement with the printing press and his devotion to the printed and spoken word as a means of advocacy and provocation.10

  The sixteen-year-old ignored Richardson’s prediction that the war would be a short, two-month romp and joined the Lone Star Grays, a Galveston military group, in 1861. Later, of his decision to enlist, Albert would write, “These were stirring ‘war times’ and, as a matter of course, my young blood caught the infection.” In November of that year he found his way to a makeshift fort at Sabine Pass, Texas, where he took up the position of “powder monkey” (carrying powder to the guns) under the supervision of another older brother, Richard Parsons, captain of an infantry company. Discharged in June 1862, Albert caught up with William, who was now leading a brigade of Confederate cavalrymen west of the Mississippi, and received an assignment as a scout. William’s brigade fought in fifty skirmishes and battles during the course of the war. Although his men respected and honored him, calling him “Wild Bill,” the Confederate Congress declined to promote him to the rank of brigadier general. After the war, he received the title major general from the governor of Texas, who believed that Parsons had rendered services insufficiently appreciated by officials in Richmond. If William’s eventual turn toward the Republican Party requires some explanation, his turn away from the former Confederate leadership perhaps does not.11

  Hardly any clashes between Confederate and Union forces took place on Texas soil, but the state was the site of multiple conflicts pitting secessionists against Union sympathizers, and Anglos against the German Texans and Tejanos (people of Mexican descent living in Texas), whom Anglos considered traitors to the southern cause. Bushwhackers roamed the countryside preying on civilians under the guise of searching for deserters. At the same time, in the words of Nelsen Denson, a former slave, “folks everywhere was comin’ to Texas,” propelled out of the Deep South by the turmoil of what black men and women called the “freedom war.” When New Orleans fell to federal forces in April 1862, planters gathered their enslaved labor forces and headed west, and the capture of Vicksburg in the summer of 1863 hastened the departure of many more from Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Red River Valley region of Arkansas.12

  Adding to the panic were the efforts of the Confederacy’s chief of labor to impress into service fully one-fourth of all the slaves en route to or settled in Texas during this time. Aggrieved slave owners complained that they could not even put down stakes in Texas before their workforces were requisitioned by Confederate labor agents. In response, General John B. Magruder complained that whole plantations were deliberately remaining on the move, and if those “who have not settled themselves” continued to stay out of reach, he would have virtually no black fatigue workers (those men assigned to support tasks) at his disposal. The general estimated that during the war owners had brought some 150,000 slaves to Texas (no doubt an exaggerated figure), most of them arriving in the state between July 1863 and July 1864. All over the South, Confederate commanders expressed dismay that the enslaved laborers who were “refugeed” away from the fighting not only depleted the food-growing workforce but also deprived the army of cooks, teamsters, and trench diggers.13

  While Yankee troops and Confederate press agents were pushing slave owners out of the Mississippi Valley, the lure of Texas as a rock-solid slave state was drawing them westward. Former slaves interviewed many years later were perhaps echoing their erstwhile owners when they accounted for the mass influx: “Cause nobody thunk dey’d have to free de slaves in Texas,” said Patsy Moses. Presumably, Texas was too far away from the battleground and the seat of federal power to fall to Union forces, and too defiant to capitulate. The so-called Texas Firsters, white men imbued with a sense of the state’s exceptionalism, counted on the reestablishment of Texas as an independent republic should the Confederacy go down to defeat. And some planters thought the Supreme Court might overturn Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. In a message of December 8 of that year, the president stipulated that vanquished Southerners must take an oath of allegiance to the Union, and relinquish their slaves “so long and so far as not modified or declared void by the decision of the Supreme Court.” Perhaps emancipation would not survive a legal challenge.14

  During the war, the mere mention of Texas was enough to inspire fear in black people all over the South. The forced trek out of the Deep South, a brutal overland Middle Passage, co
uld take three or four months if the starting point was Baton Rouge, and as long as two years for those leaving from Richmond. Along the way, enslaved people were compelled by their masters to forage for food. They had to keep to back roads and forest byways in an effort to avoid northern and Confederate soldiers. Families were separated, and mothers buried babies along the way. The ill and the elderly were abandoned at the first sign they were unable to endure life on the move. Although some brave souls managed to escape, most chose to suffer through the ordeal with kin and community members.15

  These forced migrants found no respite in the valley of the Rio de los Brazos (literally, the river of the hands of God), which was overrun with prairie chickens, bears, and panthers and devoid of dwellings, outbuildings, fences, and orchards. Living in wagons and working “from sun to sun” clearing brush and felling trees, cutting tall grass and plowing tough sod, and building bridges and cabins, men and women who had previously grown cotton or tobacco found themselves cast back into the drudge work endured by their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century forebears. Until well into the 1850s, Indians appeared by moonlight and raided the new plantations for livestock and horses. During the war, the predations of deserters from the Confederate Army, cattle rustlers, and desperadoes made life and labor on the prairie frontier not only backbreaking but also harrowing.16

  Between 1860 and 1864, McLennan County officials saw the number of taxable slaves increase from 2,105 to 3,807. The county and the town of Waco welcomed slaveholding newcomers and apparently asked few questions of the white men who sought to deprive the Confederacy of their slaves—or of their own service as soldiers. During the war, the town embraced a kind of state socialism, using taxpayer money to supply arms and ammunition to native sons in harm’s way, to care for soldiers’ families, and to bury bodies brought home. The region’s support for the South had its limits, however. In early 1864, the county court recommended that physicians be excused from the draft in order to tend to the ill at home in Central Texas.17