The Governor's Hounds

Edmund J. Davis famously hoped to “leave Texas at the end of my term of office a quiet and peaceable and law respecting state” (p. 51). Davis, a radical Republican who was governor of Texas from 1870 to 1874, created the Texas State Police in 1870 in hopes of curbing the widespread violence in the former Confederate state. As this book by Donaly E. Brice and the late Barry A. Crouch shows, the hated state police worked hard to achieve Davis's antiviolence objectives. Crouch and Brice's book reconstructs the tension between the Davis administration and the widely conservative population of Texas after the Civil War. Texans' denigration of “the governor's hounds” followed two major themes: the force's personnel were alleged criminals who sought to destroy “true” democracy in the state, and a significant portion of the force was African American. As the authors show, these accusations, as well as the majority of the violence that led to Davis forming the state police in the first place, must be understood within the political context of Reconstruction. It was far more dangerous to be a freedman or a Republican in Texas after the Civil War than it was to be a white settler facing violence from Native Americans, for example. But the violence in places such as Hill, Walker, Limestone, and Freestone Counties was sometimes more complicated than simple white-on-black crime and involved everything from political disputes to various local rivalries. Crouch and Brice show incredible command of the deep and personal nature of a dizzying array of violent encounters that involved the Texas State Police. With the election of the Democrat Richard Coke to the governorship in 1873, the short-lived reign of the police came to an end

Context (archaeology · Criminology · Democracy · Freedman · Governor · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · White (mutation · American History and Culture · Engineering · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society