When the head of state claimed election fraud and wouldn’t leave: It was 148 years ago—in Texas
Election fraud was rampant, and the courts overturned the outcome.
Then the chief executive refused to leave.
It happened in Texas in 1874, and that wasn’t the end.
When Republican Gov. Edmund J. Davis of Corpus Christi stayed put in the Capitol, victorious Waco Democrat Richard Coke and delegates climbed a ladder and took over the second floor.
Both governors ruled Texas for two days, with armed supporters of each shouting insults and waving rifles from the staircases.
“It’s kind of a fascinating event in Texas history,” said Professor Carl Moneyhon of the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, a Texan and the author of a Davis biography.
Nine years after the Civil War, it marked the last vestige of Reconstruction’s civil-rights era of a racially diverse Texas government. Davis, a former Union general, yielded to Coke and the beginning of what became the Democratic age of Jim Crow.
White Confederate sympathizers wrote Texas’ history books, so what happened next gets told different ways.
We know there was a standoff for two days, with the two governors exchanging letters.
“I have been ... duly and constitutionally elected,” Coke wrote, asking Davis to turn over “the Executive Office of the state, with the papers, archives, and all property pertaining thereto.”
Davis, riding a successful ruling from his appointed Texas Supreme Court on illegal Harris County election practices, replied, “I am myself Governor of the State until the 28th of April next. So much on this point.”
Davis offered to let the President or Congress decide who was Texas’ true governor.
Coke’s terse response said he was “declining under any circumstances” to let anyone else decide.
When Republican President Ulysses S. Grant declined to send troops to support Davis, Davis departed the Capitol.
Depending who’s telling the story, Coke and the Democrats used an ax to chop their way into the governor’s office.
“This is where the story gets complicated.” said Moneyhon, author of “Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Governor” (TCU Press, 337 pages, $27.95).
“When Davis and his people left the office, of course they locked the door.
“I don’t know what happened or whether it was Coke, but I do know the door was forced.”
A recent Washington Post retelling said Coke’s supporters busted the door with an ax.
“That was a bad article,” Moneyhon said.
The confrontation was “one of those Texas tales that got bigger in the telling than it was in fact,” he said.
For years, Texas history books by white authors disparaged Davis as a tyrannical Unionist and “carpetbagger.” (He was from Florida but lived and held office in Corpus Christi before the Civil War.)
Davis led civil rights marches of Black Texans, championed free, desegregated public education and established a racially diverse state police department.
Dallas Morning News historian and columnist Frank X. Tolbert described Davis as “a freethinker who made the social and economic elevation of blacks one of the major aims of his administration. ... He was the architect of some of Texas’ most farsighted and resilient laws,” including the Homestead Act protecting family homes from forced sale.
Davis remained chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, running twice more for governor and Congress.
Moneyhon writes: “He remained a Republican in his commitment to the equality of all men without regard to color or nationality, the protection of the rights of all men, encouragement of immigration, and the spread of education.”
At the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, his monument towers over those of all the surrounding Confederates.
This story was originally published December 26, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
