March 30, 1870: Texas became the final Confederate state readmitted to the Union, officially ending Congressional Reconstruction in the United States. With constitutional relationships between states and the Union restored, the grassroots Reconstruction work of piecing together Black freedom remained. In Texas, the state’s overwhelmingly rural character at this time meant the remainder of Reconstruction mostly happened on a county-by-county basis. These regional developments meant most individual Texans experienced and negotiated Reconstruction on a fundamentally local level. The primary authority in these interactions became local law enforcement. Edmund Jackson Davis became Governor of Texas on April 28 and delegated power to law enforcement as part of a law-and-order agenda. Davis also maintained substantial state-level power by creating a new police force of 258 officers entirely at his command. Individual Texans reconstructing their lives navigated both local and state-level agenda through their interactions with these law enforcement officers.
Citations: Randolph B. Campbell, Grassroots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 1-2, 5-6, 20, https://archive.org/details/grassrootsrecons0000camp; “The Confederates Evacuating Brownsville, Texas,” printed sketch (unknown location, c. 1864), public domain, https://emuseum.mfah.org/objects/190/the-confederates-evacuating-brownsville-texas.
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