Jeffrey Kerr

I'd always wondered what the full story was behind the small statue at 7th and Congress of a defiant woman firing a cannon. I knew that she was protecting the state government archives in Austin from people trying to move them to Houston, but I never really knew where that colorful episode fit into the larger history of Austin. Kerr has written an exhaustively detailed history that answers just about any question a curious reader might have about that incident, as well as provides an interesting look at the early history of Texas and the colorful politicians who were in charge.

In large part, the history of the Republic of Texas is the history of the conflict between Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar. Houston's name is still well-known today, but arguably Lamar, a fierce enemy of Houston's, was just as important to the state's future. Fittingly for someone with the middle name Buonaparte, he was obsessed with the idea that Texas' destiny lay in aggressive expansion, like a mini-USA. In an echo over the mother country's protracted negotiations over the location of Washington, DC, one of the major internal arguments once Texas had won its independence was over where its capital should be. Houston and his supporters argued that it made more sense to locate the capital in the east, somewhere near the coast. That would not only make it safe from Indian attacks and raids from Mexican forces, but also more convenient to the majority of the population (perhaps not coincidentally, a major candidate was the burgeoning city of Houston, then newly founded by the enterprising Allen brothers). Lamar and his supporters, in contrast, argued that locating the capital to the west was essential to help Texas press its vaguely-defined border as far out as possible, befitting the seat of government of a hopefully great, continent-spanning nation. True, there were few settlers out west, and any city would not only have to be created from scratch but constantly defended, but it made sense to start promoting new trade routes and frontier settlements as quick as possible as a spur to growth.

This core-periphery debate continued for a surprisingly long time, much longer than the equivalent Hamilton-Jefferson debate in the USA. Part of that seems to have been the typically lower competence of frontier governments compared to the centuries of experience in government possessed by the Thirteen Colonies, while another part seems to have been the lower population and resources of what was then a mostly empty, underpopulated region. Part also was due to the different attitudes of the men. Houston was a lifelong friend of the Indians and made no secret of the fact that he thought Texas should join the US as quickly as possible. Lamar hated the Indians and thought that Texas should make its name on its own. Since Texas' status as a slaveholding region meant that its admission to the Union would be difficult, once Houston's first term was up Lamar intended to steer Texas to its own destiny. While Kerr doesn't spend much time on the debate between the two beyond the location of the capital, it's a noteworthy historical irony that Texas' eventual near-bankruptcy and bailout by the US was due mostly to Lamar's attempts to finance the rapid development of Texas by deficit spending and money-printing, even as Lamar's legacy of education and infrastructure plans would be crucial to its future (to this day, the University of Texas' motto of "The cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy" is a quote of Lamar's, an avid amateur poet).

Austin itself plays a small role in the story until later. Sam Houston once called its location "the most unfortunate site on earth for a seat of government", which any good Austinite will scoff at compared to the sullen swamps of his own namesake town, but in the 1830s the advantages of its physical beauty were outweighed in most minds by the fact that it was difficult to get to. There were no civilized roads connecting it to either San Antonio or anything on the coasts, and the constant threat of the marauding Mexican army and sporadic Indian attacks made settlement a dicey proposition (the fact that most Indian attacks were retaliations for similar atrocities perpetrated on them seems never to have occurred to the white settlers). Kerr covers the perpetual wandering of the capital starting at Washington-on-the-Brazos, then to Harrisburg, Galveston, Velasco, Columbia, Houston, and finally Austin, after great debate and legislation appropriating the funds. However, in those early days legislation was often considered somewhat flexible according to whoever was in charge. Lamar may have gotten Austin established, but when his term expired Houston retook the reins and used a rumor of a Mexican invasion as an excuse to try to have the seat of government moved back to Houston.

That's where the statue of the cannon comes in. Even though Houston and most of the government had left the small and frightened town, all of the state archives were still there, which caused confusion and frustration for people who wanted to settle or build and found they had to go to two different places. A delegation was sent to retrieve the archives and bring them back east. Local Angelina Eberly spotted them packing their wagons full of documents and fired a cannon to warn the other townsfolk, who caught up with the delegation just outside of town and forced them to relinquish their plunder. Houston grudgingly let the matter drop temporarily, until his successor and the final president of Texas Anson Jones found a more permanent solution. With the added time, Austin eventually became strong enough to win two more votes confirming its status as state capital, where it has remained ever since.

This book is full of people who will be familiar to anyone who pays attention when looking at street names and landmarks - David Burnet, Edwin Waller, Kenneth Anderson, Edward Burleson are all discussed, and of course Houston, Lamar, and Jones - and is about the most complete work you could expect about its subject. I was expecting a quick overview of the funny story behind Angelina Eberly's cannon, and got a lot more than that. Take that, Houston!… (lisätietoja)

I'd previously read Seat of Empire, one of Kerr's several non-fiction works, which recounted the acrimonious debate between Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar over where the capital of the new nation of Texas was to be located. Happily for me, an Austinite, it ended up being here, but beyond the incredible wealth of historical detail Kerr revealed in that book lay a fascinating human story of a clash of personalities and ambitions - the grandiose visions of Lamar the poet for Texas to be its own sovereign empire stretching out to the Pacific, and the more hardheaded plans of Houston the politician for Texas to take its place alongside the other states as just another part of America. This novel is a (heavily) fictionalized exploration of that deep-seated personal enmity between the two men and conflict between different destinies for Texas. While I disagreed with several of Kerr's artistic decisions, I also read the whole thing straight through in a day; he is a skillful storyteller as well as an excellent historian.

Most of the novel is told in narrative form from the perspective of Edward Fontaine, a real person who was Lamar's personal secretary, and who also eventually built and became the pastor at the church that became St. David's Episcopal Church (which is where I had my christening!). There are also brief passages in each chapter from the perspective of his slave Jacob, another real person who founded several Baptist churches in Central Texas. In each chapter Edward recounts his relationship with Lamar, from their meeting during the battle of San Jacinto to their eventual parting after the end of Lamar's tenure as President of Texas, as Lamar does everything in his power, and a bit beyond, to forge Texas into an imperial nation while simultaneously feuding with Houston on both a political level and a personal one, as the less-charismatic Lamar is often upstaged by the more flamboyant Houston, with Jacob adding additional context and a non-Anglo perspective that's often an ironic counterpoint to Edward's version of events. Eventually Lamar's career is wrecked by the confluence of two scandals - his not-quite-legal dispatch of an ill-fated expedition to conquer Santa Fe and thus enrich and enlarge Texas, and the Kerr-invented affair he carries on with the wife of a blacksmith he sent along with it. The novel ends with both Edward and Jacob reflecting on Lamar's hubris, the confluence of personal tragedy and underlying character flaws that might have contributed to it, and nods toward their respective post-Lamar lives in a Texas where Houston's vision predominates (with the obvious exception of the location of the capital!), even though many Texans have unconsciously adopted Lamar's attitude of a Texas apart from the rest of the country.

I had very mixed feelings about the David-and-Bathsheba affair (surprisingly, no one in the novel mentions the obvious Biblical parallel) between Lamar and Mrs. Tucker that Kerr concocted for the novel, which plays a big role in Edward's gradual disillusionment with Lamar. It adds a very human element to Lamar's outsized personality, and is actually believable given Lamar's real-life tragic loss of his wife and brother, and it also gives its title a nice double meaning when combined with the ultimate disaster of the Santa Fe Expedition (interestingly, I learned in a KUT interview with Kerr that "Lamar's folly" was a real-life contemporaneous reference to a comically inadequate defensive palisade that Lamar had built around the Capitol; for some reason this is not referenced within the novel itself). However, I wasn't ever able to fully relax and just roll with it. Obviously just about anything is fair game when it comes to historical fiction, and Kerr does quite well with his other flourishes, but given that Lamar is the central axis around which the entire novel revolves, and the quality of his character most of all, I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to take away from his affair, especially because Kerr doesn't really need it for any ruminations on "the perils of hubris" or "power inevitably corrupts" or "sin destroys even the mighty" or what have you. Imagine a historical fiction along the lines of the Broadway play Hamilton, except that Jefferson is also given an extra mistress for some reason and ends up fighting a duel of his own, or Steven Spielberg's movie Lincoln but Lincoln is given a fictitious brother fighting for the South. It just violated my suspension of disbelief, whereas Kerr's other liberties, such as not mentioning Edward's wife or side career as a politician himself, didn't for whatever reason. It's interesting that he didn't substantially alter Sam Houston, a much more sympathetic person, to the same degree.

But if that doesn't bother you, then otherwise this is quite good. Kerr very convincingly represents the way that secondhand reports and personal loyalties can forever taint your perceptions of someone, as Edward despises Houston solely due to loyalty to Lamar and the rumors of Houston's drinking and infidelities despite Houston's unfailing courtesy towards him. Jacob throughout provides a more level-headed perspective on the two men, continually preferring Houston due to his kindness towards slaves and Indians versus Lamar's more typical Southern white supremacist views (though there is one curious scene in the book where, just prior to a scouting expedition reaching the settlement of Waterloo, Jacob states that Lamar scalps an Indian he and Edward have both shot and offers the scalp to Edward, which is supposed to illustrate his dislike of Indians, though Edward does not mention the scalping at all; otherwise their two narrations agree entirely on actual events). Lamar's own personal transition from an opponent of the genocide of the Indians to a strong proponent is also given a firm grounding in his own character, and how his desire for Texas as he saw it to become a great nation led him to pursue whatever means necessary to make that happen, including dispatching the Santa Fe expedition despite Houston convincing the Texas Congress not to authorize it. And of course the initial battle over the location of the capital plays a large role in the book, although not the infamous Angelina Eberly cannon incident later on (in that same KUT interview with Kerr he reveals that Lamar was the only President of Texas inaugurated in Houston, and that Houston was the only President inaugurated in Austin; this historical irony also for some reason wasn't mentioned here and was not really emphasized in Seat of Empire either).

As a lover of Austin history in general and of Kerr's previous book in particular I was predisposed to like it, but anyone who enjoys Texas-themed historical fiction will enjoy it as well.… (lisätietoja)

Modern observers know that the business of politics is a nasty one. Jeffrey Stuart Kerr’s Seat of Empire reminds us, however, that as politics goes, it is simply business as usual, that little has changed since the founding of this country – or since the earliest days of Texas history. Here, Kerr tells the story behind the “birth of Austin, Texas,” a city forever linked to the personal feud between the first two presidents of the Republic of Texas: Sam Houston and Mirabeau B. Lamar.

Lamar was determined to create a permanent capitol for the new republic on the site of a hill whose natural beauty he fell in love with while on a remote buffalo hunt. Houston was determined that the permanent capitol of Texas be located just about anywhere else, and preferably far to the east of Lamar’s chosen site. (One would suspect that Lamar felt equally strongly that the permanent capitol would be anywhere but its present location, Houston, the city named after his despised political rival.)

Lamar’s vision was on shaky grounds from the beginning. Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto - the battle that effectively gave birth to the Republic of Texas - was not the only politician against setting the country’s capitol in an area so remote that it could not be securely protected from Comanche raids and Mexican army invasions from the south. Other prominent Texas politicians lobbied to have the new capitol placed in cities more convenient to, and more likely to be an economic godsend for, their own constituencies.

Kerr details how Lamar and his backers were finally able to pull off the coup that would create the built-from-scratch city that became the last capitol the Republic of Texas would know – and the only capitol that the State of Texas has ever had. As Kerr puts it, “The city of Austin was born in 1839, almost died in the early 1840s, and sprang back to life thereafter…the explanation begins with a buffalo hunt.”

State of Empire is an eye-opener for those (including, I suspect, most Texans) who do not know the colorful history of Austin’s founding. Those who know the modern city’s streets well will find it difficult to envision Comanche raids on the same ground so bold and horrific that they came close to forcing abandonment of the new settlement. Somehow, largely due to a handful of brave and determined citizens, Austin survived long enough for the rest of the Republic to catch up with it.

Bottom Line: State of Empire will be of particular interest to Texas readers but will also benefit Sam Houston and Mirabeau B. Lamar scholars and historians more generally interested in this period of Texas history. The book is aimed at general readers but includes a generous number of annotations, and enough bibliographic material, to lead scholars to other sources of detail concerning the birth of Austin, Texas.… (lisätietoja)