If you’re going to wrestle with the weight of American history, Sam Houston is a good place to start.
The namesake of the nation’s fourth most populous city, Houston – who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp issued on January 10, 1964 – was a key leaders in the decades before the Civil War. A slaveowner, he helped lead Texas’ rebellion against Mexico, was the first (and third) president of the once-independent Republic of Texas, served as governor of both Texas and Tennessee (making him the only American elected to be the governor of two different states), and served as a Senator from Texas (which means that he and Mitt Romney are the only men to have been governor of one state and a senator from another).
Writing about Houston several decades ago, Bill Porterfield, a legendary Texas journalist, observed: “When he chose to stand up with a sober countenance Sam Houston could make himself the tallest man around, and [he could do so] in an age when the country, and most especially the woods, were full of giants. He could bob to the top in the most treacherous waters, but he was also quite capable of plunging himself down in despair to the murkiest bottom.”
He could be a man of principle famous for saying, “I have but one maxim; do good and risk the consequences.” As a Senator he often disagreed with positions taken by other leading southern politicians, such as Jefferson Davis, the first (and only) president of the Confederate States of America, who, Houston said, was as “ambitious as Lucifer and as cold as a lizard.” (Commentator John Krull recently repurposed the first part of that line to describe Senator Ted Cruz, who also represents Texas).
Houston, for example, supported admitting Oregon as a free state in 1848, something many Southern senators opposed. He explained: “I would be the last man to wish to do anything injurious to the South, but I do not think that on all occasions we are justified in agitating” for slavery.. He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 in part because he feared it would fuel tensions over slavery. And, most notably, as governor of Texas in 1861, he was forced out of office for opposing efforts to have Texas secede from the Union. “I would lay down my life to defend any one of the States from aggression,” he said at the time, adding. “the destruction of the union would be the destruction of all the States.”
But as Porterfield noted, while Houston (in contrast to many of contemporaries) had positive feelings for, and good relations with Native Americans, he also was “a slave-holding Anglo-Saxon racist and the most grandiose imperialist of his time.” Moreover, he added, Houston, who fled Tennessee after he discovered his wife was having an affair, “did not end up in Texas bent on good democratic deeds. He came a mercenary revolutionary with an appetite for empire and personal and political redemption, all of which he satisfied.”
And while Houston opposed secession, it’s also important to note the didn’t follow take up the Union cause. Rather, as he wrote at the time, “all my hopes, my fortunes, are centered in the South. When I see the land for whose defense my blood has been spilt, and the people whose fortunes have been mine through a quarter of a century of toil, threatened with invasion, I can but cast my lot with theirs and await the issue.” He didn’t have to wait long; he died in 1873.
It’s oddly fitting then, that the stamp portraying Houston (which was designed by Tom Lea, a well-known Texas artist and author), had a torturous path. Initially scheduled for release in December 1963; it was held back after President Kennedy was assassinated in Texas. Finally, the stamp was released on January 10, the anniversary of the start of Houston’s second and final term as governor.
This summer, Houston’s complicated legacy reemerged when city officials in Houston (finally) removed a statue called “Spirit of the Confederacy” from Sam Houston Park. Erected in 1908 by the Robert E. Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the 12-foot-tall statue of a winged angel swathed in palm leaves was dedicated “to all heroes of the South who fought for the Principles of States Rights.”
The statue is now on display at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, where it is exhibited in a fenced courtyard opposite a collection of sculpted eyeballs created by Bert Long Jr., a local artist. John Guess, Jr., the museums CEO emeritus, told the Associated Press that this installation shows that “the eyes of Black America are staring at this statue, at this philosophy. We are having a standoff.”
Guess also told Hyperallergic, “an online forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art,” that he hoped the installation will help people heal from the damage caused by systemic racism. “Healing,” he explained, “comes from taking control of negatively impactful symbols and turning them into teaching opportunities to help ensure they never have power again.”
James Douglas, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, vehemently disagreed with this approach, telling Smithsonian Magazine, “I don’t believe that a statue honoring individuals that fought to continue the enslavement of my people and destroy this nation of ours should exist anywhere on the face of the Earth.”
I think the statue should remain on display because it’s a yet another reminder that it’s wrong to say the horrific events of the last week, like the evils of slavery and racism are “not who were are.” They “are who were are.” But they’re not “who we want to be.” And keeping them in view (but also in context) can help remind us of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we hope to be.
Be well, stay safe, “do good and risk the consequences,” fight for justice, and work for peace.