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Fred H. and Ella Mae Moore Texas History Reprint Series
The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic History (Volume 22)
In 1946 historian William Ransom Hogan, then a professor at the University of Oklahoma, published The Texas A Social and Economic History . The book became an instant classic of Texas historical literature. In an era when scholarly writing on Texas history still gave disproportionate emphasis to military and political history and "great men," this book emphasized the lives of ordinary people as well as of the legendary figures of the Republic period. Hogan knew how to be a "revisionist" in the best sense of the term, offering up fresh interpretations that, as he put it, challenged the "pleasant myth" of "heroic" Texas history. Yet he also managed to balance his revisionism with an acknowledgment that the Republic era did indeed embody much that was heroic, even legendary. Naturally The Texas Republic is a product of its time. If written today, it would undoubtedly pay more attention to African Americans and Tejanos, for example. But whatever shortcomings the book may have in the eyes of modern readers, even those shortcomings make the book valuable in the college classroom, because they serve as important points of discussion for students and professors.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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January 12, 2025
Texas was a republic – an internationally recognized nation – for nine years, from 1836 to 1845. More than 150 years after the Texas Republic passed into history, Texans remain strongly aware of their state’s time as a nation – something that I am reminded of whenever I am back in San Antonio and see on the city’s historic Riverwalk a fine little restaurant called “The Republic of Texas.” And the citizen of Texas, or of any other state or nation, who wants to get a sense of what it was like to live in the Texas Republic during those nine years would do well to take up William Ransom Hogan’s 1946 book The Texas Republic.
Hogan, a professor of history at Tulane University, could have provided a dry recounting of the progress of events from the republic’s beginnings (with victory over Santa Anna’s forces at the Battle of San Jacinto) through its ending with Texas’s accession to the Union as the 28th state. Fortunately, however, he does not do so. Rather, in accordance with the book’s subtitle – A Social and Economic History – Hogan gives the reader a strong sense of the day-to-day lived reality of Texans during the republic’s short and turbulent, but vivid, life.
Many of the new nation’s citizens, like many of those who had settled in Texas during the 15 years when Texas was part of Mexico, were people who had left the United States of America, sometimes under questionable circumstances, to make a new start in Texas; some of them wrote the initials “G.T.T.” (“Gone to Texas”) on the door of a farmhouse they were abandoning, to indicate their sense that crossing the Sabine River was, for them, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Alea iacta est. The die had been cast; there was no going back.
And various aspects of the society that those frontier people formed emphasized Texas’s status as what today we might call a developing nation. Hogan looks, for example, at the wild extremes of dress adopted at different times by Sam Houston – the hero of San Jacinto, and the republic’s first president. Sometimes, Houston showed up at a function resplendent in the military finery of a conquering hero; at other times, his attire might be buckskins with a Cherokee or Mexican blanket. Hogan suggests, aptly, that “Sam Houston’s choice of clothes marked the extremes of dress in the Republic, just as his life epitomized the contrasting strengths and weaknesses inherent in an individualistic frontier society” (p. 52).
As a developing nation, Texas faced challenges in terms of what we today would call infrastructure. A chapter titled “Roads of Mud and Slush” emphasizes that Texian roads, in the main, were so poor that “The slow, uncertain trips to local markets for supplies were vexatious and often hazardous, and it was imperative to develop facilities for transporting cotton to American markets” (p. 53). One has to get used to Hogan referring to the U.S.A. as a separate country from Texas – because, in those days, it was.
A chapter titled “Times Are Terribly Severe” emphasizes an unfortunate circumstance that attended the birth of the Republic of Texas – a worldwide depression, the “Panic of 1837,” that began when the republic was just one year old. While Texas, then as now, was a resource-rich land with a singularly enterprising and hard-working people, economic instability meant that many good people’s good ideas simply did not come to fruition. Yet by 1845, with accession to the U.S.A. an approaching reality, Texans saw “rapid increases in population and commerce,” and noted with hope that “the currency situation was improving, and crops were good. In 1845, most Texans felt with justification that ‘better times’ were an immediate prospect” (p. 109).
Before reading Hogan’s book, I had already known that Baylor University in Waco was chartered under the republic. Now, however, I know that education was important to Texans across the republic, and that Baylor was just one of many Republic of Texas universities. Hogan singles out the town of San Augustine in that regard, praising “the high cultural level of many of its citizens” and adding that “Even now, a century later, something of the atmosphere of good taste still lingers in the fine, clear-cut lines of its old homes” (p. 153).
Religion remains a strong force in Texas life, and it was encouraging to hear that during the time of the Republic “A surprising lack of overt antagonism existed among the representatives of various Protestant denominations” (p. 203). What a lovely, heartening paean to ecumenism in a frontier state. Indeed, some Texas religious leaders of the present day could learn much, in that regard, from the example of their long-ago forebears in the Texas Republic.
The legal system of the Republic of Texas likewise reflected the frontier status of the young nation. Hogan records that “The unsettled conditions of the country demanded that the district judges be firm and tactful, if not always erudite” (p. 254). I will leave it to present-day Texas lawyers to determine how much court conditions in the Lone Star State of today have changed from what Hogan describes for the Lone Star Republic:
Sharp observers and magnificent storytellers, the veterans of the bench and bar created whole cycles of stories about frontier types as well as about themselves. Doubtless the best of these tales were related at suppers at which the lawyers sometimes got drunk en masse. Indeed, court week furnished one enthralling substitute for formalized amusements. (p. 254)
Comparably interesting chapters look at Texans’ favourite amusements (dances, gambling, horse-racing, and attendance at plays from The Fall of the Alamo to Macbeth and Richard III), at “tall tales” and folk culture, and at the prevailing ethos of individualism in the republic. Overall, Hogan makes the Republic of Texas sound like a difficult but exciting place in which to live. Yet the prevailing conditions of instability – and the knowledge that, down in Mexico, an embittered Santa Anna still dreamed of reacquiring Texas – meant that the vast majority of Texans greeted with relief the day of Texas’ accession to the American Union.
The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic History was originally published in 1946. For its 1969 republication by the University of Texas Press, Hogan included a chapter of “Afterthoughts” in which he acknowledged the “increasingly and often alarmingly accelerated” pace of change in post-World War II Texas. Yet he concludes on a note of firm Lone Star patriotism, stating that “the period of Texas independence remains, in my view, the most spirit-stirring, tempestuous era in the vast and varied history of the Trans-Mississippi West. If that viewpoint makes me ‘a roaring Texas patriot,’ so be it” (p. xii).
Fair enough, sir. I am not a Texan myself (though my great-uncle was from Denton), but I have travelled all over Texas, and I love Texas and the Texan people. Any reader who feels as I do about Texas will no doubt enjoy reading W.R. Hogan’s The Texas Republic.
Hogan, a professor of history at Tulane University, could have provided a dry recounting of the progress of events from the republic’s beginnings (with victory over Santa Anna’s forces at the Battle of San Jacinto) through its ending with Texas’s accession to the Union as the 28th state. Fortunately, however, he does not do so. Rather, in accordance with the book’s subtitle – A Social and Economic History – Hogan gives the reader a strong sense of the day-to-day lived reality of Texans during the republic’s short and turbulent, but vivid, life.
Many of the new nation’s citizens, like many of those who had settled in Texas during the 15 years when Texas was part of Mexico, were people who had left the United States of America, sometimes under questionable circumstances, to make a new start in Texas; some of them wrote the initials “G.T.T.” (“Gone to Texas”) on the door of a farmhouse they were abandoning, to indicate their sense that crossing the Sabine River was, for them, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Alea iacta est. The die had been cast; there was no going back.
And various aspects of the society that those frontier people formed emphasized Texas’s status as what today we might call a developing nation. Hogan looks, for example, at the wild extremes of dress adopted at different times by Sam Houston – the hero of San Jacinto, and the republic’s first president. Sometimes, Houston showed up at a function resplendent in the military finery of a conquering hero; at other times, his attire might be buckskins with a Cherokee or Mexican blanket. Hogan suggests, aptly, that “Sam Houston’s choice of clothes marked the extremes of dress in the Republic, just as his life epitomized the contrasting strengths and weaknesses inherent in an individualistic frontier society” (p. 52).
As a developing nation, Texas faced challenges in terms of what we today would call infrastructure. A chapter titled “Roads of Mud and Slush” emphasizes that Texian roads, in the main, were so poor that “The slow, uncertain trips to local markets for supplies were vexatious and often hazardous, and it was imperative to develop facilities for transporting cotton to American markets” (p. 53). One has to get used to Hogan referring to the U.S.A. as a separate country from Texas – because, in those days, it was.
A chapter titled “Times Are Terribly Severe” emphasizes an unfortunate circumstance that attended the birth of the Republic of Texas – a worldwide depression, the “Panic of 1837,” that began when the republic was just one year old. While Texas, then as now, was a resource-rich land with a singularly enterprising and hard-working people, economic instability meant that many good people’s good ideas simply did not come to fruition. Yet by 1845, with accession to the U.S.A. an approaching reality, Texans saw “rapid increases in population and commerce,” and noted with hope that “the currency situation was improving, and crops were good. In 1845, most Texans felt with justification that ‘better times’ were an immediate prospect” (p. 109).
Before reading Hogan’s book, I had already known that Baylor University in Waco was chartered under the republic. Now, however, I know that education was important to Texans across the republic, and that Baylor was just one of many Republic of Texas universities. Hogan singles out the town of San Augustine in that regard, praising “the high cultural level of many of its citizens” and adding that “Even now, a century later, something of the atmosphere of good taste still lingers in the fine, clear-cut lines of its old homes” (p. 153).
Religion remains a strong force in Texas life, and it was encouraging to hear that during the time of the Republic “A surprising lack of overt antagonism existed among the representatives of various Protestant denominations” (p. 203). What a lovely, heartening paean to ecumenism in a frontier state. Indeed, some Texas religious leaders of the present day could learn much, in that regard, from the example of their long-ago forebears in the Texas Republic.
The legal system of the Republic of Texas likewise reflected the frontier status of the young nation. Hogan records that “The unsettled conditions of the country demanded that the district judges be firm and tactful, if not always erudite” (p. 254). I will leave it to present-day Texas lawyers to determine how much court conditions in the Lone Star State of today have changed from what Hogan describes for the Lone Star Republic:
Sharp observers and magnificent storytellers, the veterans of the bench and bar created whole cycles of stories about frontier types as well as about themselves. Doubtless the best of these tales were related at suppers at which the lawyers sometimes got drunk en masse. Indeed, court week furnished one enthralling substitute for formalized amusements. (p. 254)
Comparably interesting chapters look at Texans’ favourite amusements (dances, gambling, horse-racing, and attendance at plays from The Fall of the Alamo to Macbeth and Richard III), at “tall tales” and folk culture, and at the prevailing ethos of individualism in the republic. Overall, Hogan makes the Republic of Texas sound like a difficult but exciting place in which to live. Yet the prevailing conditions of instability – and the knowledge that, down in Mexico, an embittered Santa Anna still dreamed of reacquiring Texas – meant that the vast majority of Texans greeted with relief the day of Texas’ accession to the American Union.
The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic History was originally published in 1946. For its 1969 republication by the University of Texas Press, Hogan included a chapter of “Afterthoughts” in which he acknowledged the “increasingly and often alarmingly accelerated” pace of change in post-World War II Texas. Yet he concludes on a note of firm Lone Star patriotism, stating that “the period of Texas independence remains, in my view, the most spirit-stirring, tempestuous era in the vast and varied history of the Trans-Mississippi West. If that viewpoint makes me ‘a roaring Texas patriot,’ so be it” (p. xii).
Fair enough, sir. I am not a Texan myself (though my great-uncle was from Denton), but I have travelled all over Texas, and I love Texas and the Texan people. Any reader who feels as I do about Texas will no doubt enjoy reading W.R. Hogan’s The Texas Republic.
September 4, 2011
The Republic of Texas lasted 10 years. First the USA did not want to admit Texas to the Union, then it did so with very advantages terms to Texas, such as paying off its national debt while Texas is the only state to own the public domain. A good background study that helps to explain why Texans know that they are special and unique.
November 3, 2007
Excellent history of the early Texas Republic.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews