Texas Originals

Edmund Jackson Davis

October 2, 1827–February 7, 1883

Governor Edmund Davis played a critical role in reconstructing Texas after the Civil War. He championed the constitutional rights of the formerly enslaved, established the state’s Republican Party, and instituted a centralized system of public education. Yet these accomplishments barely survived him.

Before the Civil War, Davis was a lawyer and judge in South Texas. When secessionist fever struck in the 1850s, Davis sided with Sam Houston in opposing attempts to remove Texas from the Union. When Texas seceded, Davis left the state to meet with Abraham Lincoln and formed a cavalry regiment with the U.S. Army. He fought in Union attempts to retake Galveston, Sabine Pass, and Brownsville, earning promotion to brigadier general.

After the war, Davis joined fellow unionists to re-establish state government through the federal program of Reconstruction. As president of the 1868 constitutional convention, Davis sought a new political order that insured equality under the law for all Texans, regardless of race.

In 1869, Davis won the Texas governorship, the first Republican elected to the office. However, political turmoil marred his term, as he sought to defend African American voting rights in the face of violent opposition. Davis lost the controversial election of 1873 to Richard Coke, ending Reconstruction in Texas and reversing most of Davis’s reforms. He died ten years later, his agenda left for future generations to accomplish.

For More about Edmund J. Davis

The Civil War remains one of the highest-profile and most-examined events in American history, with a wealth of resources for further study and instruction. The oft-controversial period of Reconstruction tends to attract less attention, but it is crucial for understanding the consequences and meaning of the Civil War itself. Texas PBS and the Texas Historical Commission both offer extensive on-line resources in examining this American crisis and its ramifications in understanding the constitutional history of the United States in which Edmund Davis played a significant role.

At the time of Edmund Davis’s death, the Republican Party had been pushed from power by the Democrats and would remain in the political wilderness for nearly a century. After Davis left the governor’s office in 1874, no Republican would follow him until the election of Bill Clements in 1978. Davis’s attempts to defend equality under the law so soon after the Civil War made him a deeply unpopular figure among recently defeated Confederates. When Davis died, his brother Waters Davis, himself a loyal Confederate, had Edmund buried with full honors in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. Despite Davis’s unpopularity at the time, his brother banked on the fact that history would remember Edmund by giving him the tallest monument in that entire cemetery of Texas greats, with only Stephen F. Austin and Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston as his potential rivals.

Though typically not treated as central to the Civil War narrative, military engagements in and near Texas were significant in the attempt to maintain the Union blockade of Southern ports. The Southern economy owed everything to cotton exports. While the U.S. Navy was overall successful in shutting them down, planters also learned they could move their cotton overland to Texas and south across the Rio Grande to be shipped out of Mexico. Under General Nathaniel Banks in Union-occupied Louisiana, Davis played a pivotal role in disrupting this trade. Davis himself aimed to re-occupy all of Texas, but the battles he fought in Galveston, Sabine Pass, and South Texas also served the purpose of cutting off Confederate cotton from the world market.

Selected Bibliography

Campbell, Randolph B. Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865–1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

de la Teja, Jesus F., ed. Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

King, Edward. Texas: 1874. Houston: Cordovan Press, 1974.

Moneyhon, Carl. Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Governor. Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2010.

Moneyhon, Carl. "Edmund J. Davis: Unlikely Radical." In Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas, edited by Jesús F. de la Teja. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016: 226–252.

Moneyhon, Carl. Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.