Arthur Butler Allison Page 1
Arthur Butler Allison
...and his times
After statehood in 1845, thousands of southerners bought Texas land from New Orleans brokers, left their farmed-out acreages, and followed the Cotton Trail to Texas’s famed long staple cotton. Among the large extended families to arrive in Leon County in the 1850s were Mississippi Allisons, their in-law Copelands, and the families of the ten Winn brothers from Alabama, three of whom had Coushatta Alabama brides. Soon, these and other families made the beautiful, endless meadows along the Navasota River into seas of fluffy white.
1850 Leon County was a frontier prairie, still fending off Indian remnants. By 1860, it was plantation country, producing 6,700 bales of cotton and 200,000 bushels of corn. Its population had grown more than three hundred percent to 9,300 people, 2,600 of whom were slaves.[1]
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Eighty percent of Leon County’s pioneers were from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. They were an amalgam of the customs and cultures of the old South, forged in a century of the unique southern frontier experience. In their lore were a century of wars, intermarriages between belief systems and races, and upward and downward social mobility. Their manners resembled their old South plantation ancestors who affected cavalier manners, who practiced Church of England, who sent their children to schools, who evolved an intricate honor code for dealing with their own kind, other whites, and slaves. Their outlooks reflected old South subsistence farmers and hunters who lived on small plots and in the swamps with no slaves, who practiced the raw and raucous religion of river reverends riding in and out of their lives, who felt a close kinship to Andrew Jackson, and who—echoing the Scotch-Irish revulsion at anything English—deemed education a Yankee trick. "'I've always been cheated by most men who could write,” a southerner explained to his northern visitor. “Send my sons to school to learn to read and write? No, sir. It would make just such devils out of them as you Yankees are.'"[2] Somewhere between expensive formal education available only to the wealthy and the contrariness of the southern Scotch-Irish were the families who home-schooled and gathered their children into small schoolhouses. They were the folk Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he commented that Americans of the 1820s and 1830s were as a whole the most educated people on earth. Of course, his observations took place before Horace Mann convinced the government to usurp, and thus destroy, the unique solution evolving across America to develop and maintain its superiority.
Both John and Mary Cartwright Allison could read and write, but Allison’s father and grandfather could not. The Cartwrights, on the other hand, appear to have been committed to education for generations; and it appears that Mary and her two sisters—who with their families were in the Allison wagon train to Leon County—taught their children and taught them well. Indeed, the Allisons’ oldest son, John Thomas was teaching in Leon County before the Civil War; and several of their grandchildren, male and female, would become teachers in Texas and Oklahoma.
These hybrid great-grandchildren of plantation masters and backwoods crackers arrived in Leon County with unaffected manners, a practical code of honor, and a grudging respect for education. They still reveled in camp meetings, but their Protestant churches gave them their faith and policed their morality. Texas heat, raucous weather, threatening news from the north, and fear of slave rebellion made them testy. For them, as with their forebears, slavery was as natural as family.
For millennia, in every culture, in every religious ethos, even in the most profound social philosophy, even in the northern United States, slavery was integral to natural order. In America, for two-and-a-half centuries, the southern master-slave, white-black interdependency had undergirded the social order, even as radical new concepts of rights and political equality inflamed imaginations of thinkers, writers, and religious leaders sufficient to cause successful anti-slavery movements in Great Britain and America. However, no matter how compelling these ideas, they contended with a tribal consciousness deeply ingrained in human neurology that instinctively accords personhood only to one's kind, thus separating all others from value, thus justifying murder and enslavement of the ostracized, the criminal, the competitor, and the stranger.
Even the inflamed imaginations of enlightenment thinking did not entirely escape tribalism. John Locke had argued that human behavioral attributes and values, therefore beliefs, therefore culture, almost entirely derived from experience. From this argument, English and American Whigs reasoned that rights were not a universal human attribute (as implied, for instance, in the Declaration of Independence). Rights, Whigs argued, emerged from culture and heritage; and, in the Revolution, many Americans fought to defend their British rights—not Jefferson's natural rights. Subsequently, despite the Declaration of Independence, the controversy over the origin of rights forced the Constitutional Convention to leave the matter to the states.
Employing the Whig argument, the South determined that Africans were outside society, therefore enjoyed no rights, and were, therefore, subject to enslavement; and by no means was this philosophy exclusive to the South. Abraham Lincoln was a political Whig before the party merged with an amalgam of movements, including Abolitionists, to become the Republican Party. He was expressing Whiggish roots when he advocated sending the emancipated slaves back to Africa.
No only did Leon County whites believe that slavery was both justified and natural, unlike the old South, where only large landowners and town squires had slaves, almost half Leon County’s households had at least one slave. Many of the rest likely aspired to do so.[3] Slaves were in the fields, the homes, and businesses. Slave traders ("speculators") frequently held auctions in Centerville, the county seat, in front of the courthouse. Molly Watson, a former slave of Centerville tavern owner Thomas Garner, described the situation thus:
Speculators uster buy up niggers jest lak dey was animals and dey would travel around over de country an' sell 'em. I've seen 'em come through there in droves lak cattle. De owners would ride in wagons or buggies. De would come into town and camp overnight an' nex' mornin' dey would parade 'em around and den take 'em to de town square and put 'em on de block and sell 'em. I've seen men, wives, and little children sold away from each other.[4]
In 1860, John and Mary Cartwright Allison and their family farmed four hundred Leon County acres with ten slaves.[5]
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Except for the threat that Washington posed to slavery and for the federal cavalry fighting Indians and Mexicans, government for Leon County was the sheriff protecting life and property and collecting taxes, the slave patrol capturing runaways, and courts enforcing contracts, assessing fines, and punishing lawbreakers. These officials were concerned only with culprits or with whether contract terms were lawful, not good or evil per se, not vulgarity, not obnoxious behavior that did not otherwise violate lives and property. But Leon County’s church congregations did vigorously enforce behavior and manners.
In Aristotle's ethical community, proper behavior was so necessary to comity, cooperation, and, therefore, security that no citizen's behavior was above scrutiny and reprimand. In many ways, Aristotle could have been writing about 1850 Leon County's democratic, participatory, all-consuming, church-centered, exclusionary, baptism-required communities that rendered blacks into natural slaves, Yankees into barbarians, and, sadly, neighbors belonging to other denominations into candidates for hell.[6]
Government may have been constitutionally bound to respect privacy and individual rights, but Leon County's churches were not; and their self-righteous intrusions, arguably, were vital to the community's social stability. Unlike the sheriff or their medieval counterparts, Leon County's churches could not exercise violent coercion; but they did employ the power of eternal damnation combined with social ostracism to exert powerful sway over their flocks, both white and black. Moreover, despite being Jacksonians, despite knowing, cognitively, that the authority for their government came from themselves, Leon County harbored a suspicion that the church had a direct link to the incontestable Authority that validated government and the laws government that enforced.
In addition to being the moral authority for government and society, the Leon County church provided the social glue. It baptized children into the congregation and the greater Christian community. It conditioned children for the community ethos. It sanctioned marriages and committed deceased brethren to the bosom of the Lord. It defined community values, prioritized community virtues, and gave everyone, including slaves, a sense of identity and place in the communal order of being. Members conducted themselves with one eye on their own needs and aspirations and the other on the congregation's approval or disapproval. To be shamed publicly was bad, but one could appeal for and receive forgiveness from the congregation. To carry the shame privately was much worse; transgressions known only to oneself and God were not as easy to expiate.[7]
Shortly after the Allisons arrived in Leon County, they helped organize the Concord Baptist Church. John served as its deacon for years.[8] Extracts from the church log just after the Civil War illustrate how seriously this community-centered church took its moral policeman role.
Saturday before the second Sabbath in Feb [1875]: After Service... The Church went into Conference. By motion...Preferred a charge against Bro. Wesley Burdett for swearing...
January 1876...charges preferred against Bro. John Jeter, [cussing] and dancing. By motion and second was excluded from the fellowship of the Church.
April 2d, [1876]...Preferred charges against Bro. Pierce Jeter for cursing and unchristian conduct. By motion & second was excluded from fellowship of this church.
Saturday before the second Sabbath in July [1876]...preferred charges against Bro. W. T. Reed, dr[i]nking and profanity.
Saturday before the second Sabbath in August [1876]...Bro. W. T. Reed came forward and denied charges of drunkenness, profanity on the last minutes. By motion and second the charges Bro. W. T. Reed fell through for want of proof.
Saturday before the second Sabbath in September [1876]...preferred a charge against Wilson Bowers for a duration of non-fellowship with the Church & excluded him.[9]
In 1895, the Clear Creek Baptist Church “excluded” John Allison’s son, Julius Caesar, and his wife, Ella Snow Allison, for “non-attendance and giving dances.” In 1904, they again excluded Ella Allison for “non-attendance.” She was then in poor health and living with a daughter in Oklahoma. The congregation must have been a tough crowd.
As much as religion permeated the lives of Leon County whites, it had a larger place in the lives of slaves. Before the Civil War, some southern slave owners took their slaves to church. Many church buildings had balconies where Sunday after Sunday slaves would hear white preachers proclaim that the Lord had forever assigned the sons of Canaan forever to be the hewers of wood and drawers of wood for the rest of mankind. Some masters allowed black preachers onto the plantations, but only if they exhorted the slaves to heed Paul's letter to Timothy admonishing the slaves to do their masters honor and provide faithful service.[10]
Some Sundays we went to church some place. We always liked to go any place. A white preacher always told us to obey our masters and work hard and sing, and when died we'd go to heaven.[11]
My missus took us chillum to de Baptis' church and de white preacher be preach. De cullud folks could have church demselves iffen de have the manager of 'ligion to kinder preach. Course he couldn't read, he just talk what heared de white preachers say.[12]
Nevertheless, for the most part, the ex-slaves saw this preaching for what it was—propaganda to keep them in line:
If a cullud man take de notion to preach, he couldn't preach about de Gospel. All he could preach about was obey de massa, obey de overseer, obey dis, obey dat. Dey didn't make no passel of fuss about prayin' den. Sometimes dey have prayin' meetin' in de cabin at night. Each one bring de pot and put dere head in it to keep de echoes from gittin' back. Den dey pray in de pot. Dat's de God's truth.[13]
To many slaves, the "gospel" echoed in narratives of spirits from the ancestors:
My old granddad told me all 'bout conjure and voodoo and luck charms and signs. To dream of clear water lets you know you is on de right side of Gawd. De old voodoo doctors was dem dat had de most power, it seem, over de nigger before and after de war. De had meetin' places in secret and a voodoo kettle and nobody know what dem put in it, maybe snakes and spiders and human blood, no tellin' what. Folks all come in de dark of de moon, old doctor wave his arms and de folks crowd up close. Dem what in de voodoo strips to the waist and commence to dance while de drum beats. Dey dances faster and faster and chant and pray till dey falls down in a heap.[14]
Other former slaves tell of sneaking off to put their "hand in the pot" or, much to the chagrin of the masters, secretly to dance and shout in prayer.
The ex-slaves of the narratives had many different, viewpoints and opinions; but they were almost unanimous on two points: for one thing, when the time came, they were happy to be freed; second, the white man's religion was, if not suspect, certainly inadequate to the spiritual needs of a very spiritual people.