By Bud Kennedy
bud@star-telegram.com
Texas' orneriness is nothing new.
We hated the president 150 years ago.
Not only did we hate Abraham Lincoln, we also hated Thanksgiving.
While you're watching movies or eating turkey this week, remember that Texas not only rebelled against the federal government, but also despised the so-called Yankee holiday.
Years after the war, in 1883, former Confederate Col.-turned-Texas Gov. Oran Roberts still flat refused to observe Thanksgiving.
"It's a damned Yankee institution anyhow," he said.
Several presidents and governors had declared days of prayer or gratitude before the Civil War, but Lincoln declared the first official Thanksgiving Day holiday for prayer and "healing" in 1863.
Texas, of course, was in a whole 'nuther country then. We were under President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate States, then freshly defeated at Gettysburg.
The next year, the U.S. turned Thanksgiving into a wartime cause, with the Union League feeding veterans and their families in New York.
The New York Times urged Gen. Sherman's troops to "pick up and bear aloft on their bayonets all the turkeys, geese and chickens of Georgia."Texas' resentment only grew with the Confederate failure.
When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the Galveston Daily News even wrote that assassin John Wilkes Booth was "ridding the world of a monster."Under Union-appointed officials during Reconstruction, Texas begrudgingly joined the federal Thanksgiving celebration under President Andrew Johnson.
In 1868, Gov. Elisha Pease proclaimed the holiday "that a spirit of peace and subordination to the law may speedily unite our people."
But the Austin
State Gazette's Thanksgiving editorial that year read like a modern-day talk-show transcript.
Editor Robert Jossleyn, Davis' former personal secretary, asked exactly why Texans should be thankful on what he called "General [U.S.] Grant's Thanksgiving."
"Our civil liberty is gone; our Constitution trampled in the dust; self-government denied us," he wrote angrily.
"Let us be thankful, then, for Congressional reconstruction, the 14th Amendment and [n-word] voting."
Yes.
Let us be thankful.
Bud Kennedy's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538Twitter: @budkennedy
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