Enslaved Persons and Freed Men and Women Came with the First European Settlers

JUDY LINSLEY

Race relations were complicated, even before Emancipation. The Ashworth family is a case in point. At one time Jefferson County’s largest stockholders, they are listed as Mulattos (mixed-race) in census records. Though the Texas Republic denied entry to free Black persons, Congress passed a special law in 1840, known as the Ashworth Law, allowing them to remain if they had been in Texas before the Texas Revolution. The law didn’t bring social acceptance, however; when Electa Jane, daughter of Beaumont merchant and tanner John Jay French, eloped with an Ashworth family member, French disowned her. Later, in the 1850s, an Ashworth relative was hanged for the murder of a deputy sheriff; resultant vigilante violence against the family caused most of them to leave and/or lose their property.

In 1845 Texas joined the United States. The townsite was still only partially cleared, with dirt streets and log buildings. A visiting “Galveston Weekly News” reporter, at first “woefully disapointed as to the appearance of the town,” later commended Beaumonters for their remarkable “politeness and civility” and stayed for three and a half years.

In 1860 the population of Beaumont stood at 1100. Steam power—boats and sawmills—had come to Beaumont in the 1850s. Machine-sawn lumber slowly replaced logs or hand-sawn lumber, though the “dogtrot” architectural style

In this 1860 census, a William McFaden is listed as owning eight people. Eight known pages of Jefferson County’s 1850 and 1960 U.S. Census of Slaves are viewable at bit.ly/ slavecensus. As C.W. Lewis wrote, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” remained popular. Steamboats brought in more and better goods. Two railroads ran through town, built by gangs of enslaved persons. Beaumont had a newspaper, the “Beaumont Banner.”

The Civil War began in 1861. Beaumonters voted 141 to 12 to secede and young white males rushed to enlist. Beaumont was spared invasion twice: in 1862 by yellow fever, which prevented Union gunboat crews from coming ashore at Sabine Pass, and in 1863, when a small Southern force at Sabine Pass prevented the invasion of Texas by Northern forces. The victory kept Southeast Texas from suffering complete economic devastation.

The war ended in 1865; soldiers returned home and Beaumont and the rest of the South picked up the pieces. White Beaumonter William A. Fletcher, who in 1861 had rushed to join the Confederate Army, wrote, “I gathered up father’s old carpenter tools and went on a job at a dollar and a half per day, about one hundred feet from the place where I left off work.” He became a leader in Southeast Texas’s lumber industry.

On June 19, 1865, enslaved Texans were told they were emancipated, and they had to start completely from scratch. African American Woodson Pipkin had been the valet and bodyguard of John Fletcher Pipkin, a lay Methodist minister from Beaumont. John Pipkin had taught Woodson to read and write, and Woodson, also a minister, started the first school for African Americans in Beaumont.

Compared with much of the Deep South, the postwar economy in Beaumont rebounded quickly with a new industry: a lumber boom, courtesy of the vast longleaf yellow pine forests in East Texas. The trees were harvested and milled, and with the return of the railroads in the 1870s, exported to the world. Beaumont became a lumber boomtown in the economy of the New South. Emancipated African Americans came from plantations and farms in upper East Texas to work in Beaumont sawmills, increasing the local Black population by 285 percent between 1860 and 1880. By 1880 African Americans made up 45 percent of Beaumont’s population, most living in segregated neighborhoods they established near the mills.

Historian Judith W. Linsley was formerly on the staff at the McFaddin-Ward House Museum and Director of Lamar’s Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast. Among her publications are “Giant under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery,” and “Charlton-Pollard: The Story of a Neighborhood.”