How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [84]
[Robert Toombs] was made Secretary of State for the Confederacy … but resigned late in July, professedly that he might take the field [of battle].… Soon he was sent back to the rebel Senate, probably expecting to be chosen its presiding officer. But R. M. T. Hunter was too smart for him. That Virginian, rich in initials, was made Secretary of State after Toombs … [then] resigned, was sent to the new rebel Senate, and has been elected its president pro tem.
Hunter served in the Confederate Senate for the duration of the war, but the center of action was on the battlefield. Near the war’s conclusion, Hunter was one of three delegates selected to meet with President Lincoln at a peace conference held behind Union lines in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
The war left Hunter economically debilitated. In time, a government tidbit was thrown his way via an appointment as collector of the port of Tappahannock, Virginia. By then, Robert M. T. Hunter had become much like that section of the District he had restored to Virginia—a part of the government but hardly a participant, taking whatever opportunity came his way. Under the circumstances, however, there was no place to which he could retrocede himself.
TEXAS
SAM HOUSTON
The Man Who Lassoed Texas
Speaker of the House: Samuel Houston, you have been brought before this House, by its order, to answer the charge of having assaulted and beaten William Stanberry, a member of the House of Representatives of the United States from the State of Ohio, for words spoken by him in debate upon a question then depending before the House.… If you desire the aid of counsel … your request will now be received.
Samuel Houston: Mr. Speaker, I wish no counsel.
—REGISTER OF DEBATES, 22ND CONG., APRIL 17, 1832
If you think Texas is big, take a look at the man whose name is now the state’s biggest city: Sam Houston. He stood nearly six and a half feet tall, and that was the least of his outsized aspects. Houston, along with Stephen Austin, are the two people most associated with the fact that Texas is today part of the United States. While Austin followed a relatively direct path (continuing his father’s founding of a colony in Mexico’s sparsely populated region of Tejas), Houston’s path was far more erratic. In retrospect, however, Houston’s life seems inevitably to have led to Texas. Or to being shot dead.
Houston was born in Virginia, the son of a distinguished officer in the American Revolution. When his father died in 1807, the family moved to Tennessee, where fourteen-year-old Sam was enrolled in a Christian school run by his brothers. He played hooky so often the family put him to work in their farm-based trading post. Many of its customers were Cherokees from a nearby settlement. Sam was fascinated both by them and by the novels and literary classics he’d bring to the store from his father’s library. The only downside to being a clerk was being a clerk. So Sam took off at age sixteen and headed into the woods to live with the Cherokees. Over the next several years, he learned their language and customs and found a second father. Houston was adopted by Oolooteka, known also as John Jolly, the leader of these Cherokees and, after their relocation, chief of the Arkansas Cherokees.
Following in the footsteps of both fathers, Sam Houston fought in the War of 1812, which involved the Cherokees, allying with the Americans in response to the fact that their enemy, the Red Stick Creeks, had allied with the British. Wounded at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Houston nevertheless led a courageous charge when the battle seemed lost, only to discover that his comrades hadn’t followed. Within moments Houston was again wounded, this time, it was believed, mortally. But he defied the doctors and lived, and also came to the attention of the commanding general, Andrew Jackson, who became yet another father—or, more accurately, godfather—to Sam Houston. “Old Hickory,