“Before he had gotten half way down the aisle, Armstrong of Lamar had been elected president. Davis ordered the doorkeeper to open the doors so that members could go out. The doorkeeper refused.
“Then ensued a scene which cannot be described. Hamilton arose and spoke under all the excitement of the evening—spoke as only those can speak who are orators born—spoke until, if I had been in Davis’ place, I would have prayed that the capitol might crush upon me and hide my awful shame.”
The constitution was then adopted as a whole and this revolutionary attempt to break up the convention and prevent the reconstruction of the State and her readmission into the Union met a humiliating defeat.
The good General Canby, being then in command of the Department, approved of our course of action and submitted the constitution to the people.
Three days later, February 8, 1869, at Austin, Texas, the writer married Mary, eldest daughter of Governor A. J. Hamilton, who in this year of Grace 1900, still abides with him; but that is “another story,” which he reserves for a later chapter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HAMILTON-DAVIS CONTEST OF 1869—ADOPTION OF CONSTITUTION.
The reader may think it strange that I give so much space to so common an occurrence as a State election, but the explanation is simple. It was the first reasonable attempt to carry our State back into the Union. The Democrats had made one effort and had failed, because they had offended the dominant sentiment of the country by “Apprentice Laws,” and other measures which virtually reduced the freedman to a state of slavery, and by electing to the United States Senate a man who had presided over the convention which carried Texas out of the Union. Because of this failure, the Democrats, as a party, took no part in the second effort to reconstruct the State, but divided, those of them who voted at all, between the two Republican candidates.
Thousands of them sullenly refused to vote at all. It was therefore a contest between _men and ideas_. _The questions were all new._ True, there have been many State elections since then, but the results have all been foregone conclusions, so that the younger generation of Texans know nothing of the excitement, the strenuousness, the manliness, of a real contest for the political control of a great State.