In August 1865, Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer rode into Texas, commanding a column of Union troops sent in to enforce Texas' forced reentry into the United States. A Civil War hero, the 25-year-old "Boy General" had been cover-boy for an 1864 issue of Harper's Weekly, which was then the most widely read magazine in the country. A few weeks later, Harper's Weekly devoted a two-page centerspread to the Virginia exploits of the gallant young blonde and his cavalry troopers.
"Old Curly," as Custer was also called, was adored by his wife and the Northern press, but his men told a different story. Emmet West described the division's entry into Texas: "We had marched over 300 miles in 19 consecutive days and needed rest, but Custer did not intend that we should have any. Soon after going into camp he issued orders for us to graze our horses 3 hours each day and to drill mounted in double ranks--new tactics for us--for hours each day. As for the drilling, we would not try to learn anything but simply went through the motions mechanically. We had plenty of orders issued us in those days, but rations, at times, were scarce."
The Boy General's division arrived at Hempstead on August 26, with rations exhausted, and no supplies awaiting them. Many of the soldiers were barefooted, almost naked, and without blankets. On top of that, Custer issued an order forbidding the men to forage the Texas countryside, which had suffered little during the war, compared to most of the rest of the Confederacy.
In early November, Custer's command marched from Hempstead to Austin, where they went into winter quarters. They arrived on November 4 and set up camp on rolling ground north of Austin town, where they overlooked "a pretty town of summery stucco houses set amidst the perennial green of the live oaks." At that time, Austin ended just north of the Capitol. The interim Governor offered Custer use of the old state Blind Asylum as headquarters. It stood on the outskirts of northeast Austin, next to the city cemetery. After years of bivouacking with her husband in the forest and on the uncultivated prairies, Libby Custer thought Austin to be a regal place. The Custers rode daily, and they found the countryside surrounding Austin to be delightful. The roads were smooth and the terrain pleasantly rolling. They especially enjoyed Mount Bonnell, where they picnicked and drank in the expansive views. Sometimes the regimental band accompanied them. Another favorite camping spot was Seiders Springs, on the old Austin-to-Burnet Military Road, where the bubbling springs still fill the pools that Ed Seiders carved out of the limestone bluff.
Custer liked the stretch of Shoal Creek that is now Pease Park so much that he established his "bullpens" here, where unreconstructed rebels and other criminals and ne'er-do-wells passed the day and night. When 35 of his men died from a fever, he buried them here. After a flood in the 1880s washed up some of the bodies, they were exhumed and moved to a national cemetery in Washington.
The Custers seldom rode through town. Mrs. Custer claimed that her husband disliked the publicity that a group of cavalrymen necessarily cause in a city street. But she also noted that even 12-year-old boys went around armed, and that "bad blood was never held in abeyance."
As fond as she claimed to be of camp life, Libby Custer enjoyed the luxuries of headquarters life, such as a bathtub, chests of drawers, carpet, and a fireplace. Custer, his family, and staff celebrated Christmas in grand style, with a large Christmas tree and presents purchased in San Antonio, where the stores were filled with many beautiful things from Mexico. The general even helped cook Christmas dinner.
The Christmas season did little to lift his troop's low morale. Custer used stern measures to maintain discipline, flogging several men and shaving their heads. His troops, who were volunteers rather than members of the regular army, wanted to go home now that the war was over, and many of them did. Nearly half of his command deserted.
Christmas for Custer's division came over a month late. The few who remained were to be officially mustered out of service. Custer was the first to read the orders for the division's mustering out. He arranged for 12 horses to be sent out and strategically posted Pony Express-style for his timely escape to Brenham, late on the night of February 4, 1866. There was, reportedly, a detachment of men to be hidden in the bushes before daylight with carbines aimed to fire a farewell salute at Old Curly, but the wily Custer sped past the ambush point about 2 hours before they got into position. Once safe, Custer accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel in the regular army. He reported for duty at Fort Riley, Kansas, on July 28, to begin his career as an Indian killer.
Part of the Texas myth entails having more and bigger of everything: cows, oil wells, pretty girls, ugly dogs, and blowhard millionaires and/or governors. Even George Washingtons. George Washington Brackenridge and George Washington Littlefield weren't the fathers of their country, but to the University of Texas, Brackenridge is its patron saint and Littlefield its first Santa Claus. Despite sharing the same first names and species designation, the two men were as far apart as heaven and hell on every issue imaginable. Their feud over what and where the University of Texas would be was as big as the state itself.
The University of Texas was conceived in 1839 by the Congress of the Republic of Texas and delivered by vote of the people in 1881. Its schooling commenced in September 1883.
Contrary to the University's current privileged position, its virtues were then highly suspect. Some Texans thought that a university and faculty of the first class were unnecessary in a state where lower education was still mostly second-rate. Others thought contour plowing more worthy of study than Latin. Moralists saw state universities as "hotbeds of immorality, prolifigation and licentiousness." That argument is still being made. Populists called them havens for rich men's sons and opposed their very existence.
The university's fortunes rose and fell according to the whims of the Texas legislature, which funded it biennially. For what little it was worth, the legislature gave the University a million-acre dowry in West Texas thought to be as worthless as the Sahara and rented out accordingly.
The University needed a guardian angel. It got George Washington Brackenridge, whom Roy Bedicheck would later proclaim "The Patron Saint of the University of Texas."
Born in Indiana in 1832, Brackenridge attended the University of Indiana before coming with his family to Texas in the 1850s. He entered Harvard Law School in December 1860, but returned to his family home in Jackson County, Texas, when the Civil War began. While his brothers eventually joined the Confederate Army, Brackenridge refused. Instead, he ran Confederate cotton down to Mexico for a profit. In 1863, he left Jackson County under mysterious circumstances, evidently talking himself out of a noose that was around his neck. He went to New Orleans, which the Yankees had captured in 1862, and worked as a U.S. Treasury agent.
After the war he settled in San Antonio, where he dealt cotton and organized the San Antonio National Bank, in 1866. Brackenridge favored Texas cattlemen with his loans, and they made him rich. In 1874, he opened the First National Bank of Austin, at the corner of Congress and 6th.
In 1886, he became a regent of the University of Texas. He would serve until 1911. The only Republican regent, he was also the only Republican appointed to statewide office for over 40 years. The new University, like most of the rest of Texas, was a solidly Confederate institution. The first faculty chairman, the first English professor, the first philosophy professor, and both law school professors had served the Confederacy. Brackenridge cottoned to his new responsibility like 3 bales to an acre. After nearly 25 years in office, he wrote to a friend, "There is certainly not a more honorable or important place" in which to serve.
He gave the university money, defended its intellectual integrity against almost constant attack by the "sockless," Populist crowd, and promoted complete education and career equality for women, including generous scholarships.
Almost alone among his peers, Brackenridge believed that every field of honorable employment open to men should be open to women on the same terms. When the U.T. Medical School opened in Galveston in 1891, it, like the main campus in Austin, was open to women. But few women entered medical school, at least partially because there were no living quarters available. Brackenridge donated $41,000 to build a women's dorm and gave a generous scholarship to practically every woman who entered the medical school.
He spent his own money to straightened out the University's land holdings. When he became a regent, the lands were administered by the state Land Commissioner and produced almost no income. They hadn't even been properly surveyed yet. Brackenridge took care of this and had a thorough abstract prepared. Then he began agitating the legislature to turn over management of the lands to the regents. When handed this responsibility by the lege, the board of regents promptly palmed it off on Brackenridge, who administered them until 1911. His careful care of the lands during this time, when they produced less than $100,000 in revenue annually, meant that the university would be in firm control when oil revenues brought in that much money every week.
As far as the students of the day were concerned, Brackenridge Hall was his greatest legacy. The $10,000 he donated in 1890 for the construction of this dining and residence hall was the first major gift to the university by an individual. "The Eyes of Texas" was written in a B Hall dorm room. He also donated to various university departments a collection of rare Texas books (that would form the core of the University's current, fabulous collection of Texana), a collection of flint tools and fossils, a telescope, and a mollusk collection.
As the university grew, Brackenridge knew that it would soon outgrow its original 40 acre plot, and that buying land around it to expand would be expensive, since it was already heavily developed. Brackenridge's solution was to donate a nearly 500 acre tract he owned on Lake Austin, which now bears his name. Here, Brackenridge felt, the University would have enough room for all time to come, in a wooded, parklike setting. So, in 1909, he donated the land to the university, with the stipulation that the main campus be moved there. The deed was a curious one, stipulating that the university could not sell the land or use it for purposes other than educational during the lifetimes of six young children, who Brackenridge had chosen because of their forebears' longevity. If the university attempted to use the land for other than educational purposes or sell it, ownership would revert to the school children of Jackson County.
Texas may have been a democratic state, but academic freedom was a radical concept to many Texans, who thought that only Texans and/or Christians should teach Texans, and if they were Confederate veterans or sons of veterans, so much the better.
Lecturing about Darwin's theory of evolution or the relative merits of the gold standard (most Texans favored bimetallism) could cost you your job. In the case of Professor David Franklin Houston, the regents let him off with a warning, but the legislature launched an investigation, charging that the faculty was teaching political heresies not in sympathy with Southern traditions. It charged regents to hire only faculty members who "were known to be in sympathy with the Southern political institutions and to cancel contracts with those not in sympathy."
While no one can fault Brackenridge's financial generosity to the University of Texas and education in general (he also contributed generously to other institutions), in the end he was decisively outspent by Major George Washington Littlefield. Littlefield ultimately gave $2 million to the University of Texas (most of it in his will) and served 7 years as a regent. But if not for two incidents precipitated by George Washington Brackenridge in 1910, none of this would have passed, at least not into the hands of the University of Texas.
Prior to 1910, Littlefield had but passing interest in the university; he lived in a mansion next door and passed it every day on his way to his American National Bank downtown. He was one of the wealthiest men in Texas.
Born in Mississippi in 1842, Littlefield came with his parents to Gonzales County in 1850. He attended Baylor University (at Independence) before enlisting with Terry's Texas Rangers in 1861. He fought at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Lookout Mountain. Severely wounded in battle the day after Christmas 1863, he was given a battlefield commission as major. He returned to Gonzales County at war's end and began driving longhorns to Kansas. He acquired vast lanholdings in the Texas Panhandle and on the Pecos River in New Mexico. He moved to Austin in 1883 and founded the American National Bank of Austin, of which he was president until his death. In 1901, he purchased the 312,000 acre Yellow House division of the famous XIT Ranch and formed the Littlefield Lands Company to sell the land to farmers around the town of Littlefield in Lamb County. In 1894, he built a $50,000 mansion on the north side of the University of Texas campus.
Like any other Texan who could read, Littlefield was aware of Brackenridge's gift of bottomland to the University and the plans to move the University campus there. Brackenridge's dream campus by the Colorado River would incorporate the estate of former Governor Elisha M. Pease. During Pease's first stint as governor, in 1858, the state finally appropriated land and money to fund the university that had been created, on paper, in 1839. The Civil War prevented the act of 1858 from being carried out, however. In the face of the Civil War, Pease chose to retire from public life rather than support secession and the Southern cause. He briefly served as provisional governor in 1867, appointed by General Phil "If I owned Texas and Hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell" Sheridan, but quit when he and General J. J. Reynolds (the military commander in Texas) disagreed over the course of Reconstruction in Texas. Pease may have been governor, but Reynolds ruled. A banking associate of Brackenridge, Pease had been appointed one of the original U.T. regents in 1881, but his appointment was withdrawn in the face of widespread public protest. The Brackenridge dream campus blueprint showed a broad boulevard leading from the original 40 acre campus to the Pease mansion, which would stand at the entrance of the new 1500 acre campus. Thus, the University would serve as a permanent memorial to Pease, and by extension, the Union. But a memorial that seemed fitting and appropriate to Brackenridge was like a call to arms for Littlefield and his fellow unreconstructed rebel veterans.
Then, in June 1910, the United Daughters of the Confederacy offered the University an annual prize of $25 to be given to the student who wrote the best paper on a subject in Southern history. Normally, the cash-hungry regents would have snapped up such munificence unanimously. But regent Brackenridge voted "no" on accepting the gift, stating that the university shouldn't encourage "the keeping alive and discussion of Civil War subjects." The motion carried over his sole nay, but the shot he fired was heard all over Austin, including the Littlefield home place.
To Littlefield and comrades, it looked as if the South was losing the war all over again.
In 1911, newly elected Governor Oscar B. Colquitt swept out the entire university board of regents, with the exception of Brackenridge, whom he reappointed. Among his new appointees was Major Littlefield, who publicly refused to serve on the same board as Brackenridge. After Colquitt reasoned with him, Littlefield changed his mind, whereupon Brackenridge resigned. His exodus from the board of regents did not end Brackenridge's interest in the university. It was general knowledge that he had promised to leave his fortune, estimated at $3 million or $4 million, to the university. In 1913, Brackenridge donated $25,000 to establish a loan fund for women students in architecture, law, and medicine.
Having as yet donated nothing but hot air and some personal time to the U.T. cause (while his American National Bank enjoyed control of the university fellows fund), Littlefield was evidently shamed or riled (he was also a male chauvinist) by Brackenridge's gift into putting his money where his mouth had been. Littlefield donated $25,000 to establish a fund for the study of Southern history.
At this point, momentum shifted from Brackenridge to Littlefield. Brackenridge would make no further major gifts to the university; Littlefield was just getting warmed up. The battle over the future and location of the University of Texas was just beginning to heat up too.
In 1914, James Ferguson was elected governor, one of those self-made men that Texans can't seem to stop electing governor. Ferguson left school in about the fifth grade, after a teacher ordered him to bring in a load of wood. He walked away and eventually became a lawyer, back before you had to go to school to become one. Mindful of his path to success, he felt the state had no more more responsibility to educate men to be lawyers than to be blacksmiths, and so he set about to gut the University. In 1917, he vetoed the appropriation bill for the university. University president Robert Vinson asked Brackenridge to underwrite the university's expenses for the next 2 years, which would amount to about $1.5 million. This Brackenridge agreed to do, even to the extent of his entire fortune. But he also slyly suggested to Vinson that he hit up Littlefield as well, which Vinson did. As Brackenridge anticipated, Littlefield took the bait, not only promising to match Brackenridge dollar for dollar, but to shoulder the entire burden if necessary.
Their generosity went unrequited. The attorney general overturned Farmer Jim's veto on a technicality. In special session, the legislature impeached and removed Ferguson from office, replaced him with Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby, and passed a new appropriations bill.
Hobby reappointed Brackenridge to the Board of Regents, and so for the first time, the two George Washingtons sat at the same business table.
President Vinson described the two. "Both were strong men, self-reliant, capable. Both grew up with the State of Texas, had far-sighted vision of and confidence in its progress and profited, materially, to an unusual degree from their shrewd judgments of its values. One was primarily a man of thought, the other a man of action. One always wanted to know the explanation and meaning of things, the other the best method to do things. There was between them a personal antagonism which I can only explain by saying that it had its roots in the Civil War and the period of reconstruction that followed. Each of them seemed to regard the other as the representative, if not the embodiment of the principles which had once driven the nation asunder. Any yielding of one to the other would have been regarded by both as a surrender of the principles for which they had stood and fought."
With this in mind, it probably took World War I to keep them together. With America's entry into the war, the University was flooded with students needing to be trained in the arts of war. When government red tape threatened to slow down building construction or contract completion, Littlefield loaned the university money, allowing it to get the work done first and seek compensation later. Walter Long of the Austin Chamber of Commerce (for whom the lake is named) quipped, "Had the Kaiser known that Major Littlefield and Bob Vinson were going to gang up against him, he would perhaps never have invaded Belgium." During the same period of time, he gave $500,000 to buy the Wrenn Library and made additional donations to the Southern history collection.
The war safely won, Brackenridge retired from the Board of Regents when his term expired in 1919. At age 87, he wanted to relax and enjoy what was left of his life. Major Littlefield stepped down in January 1920, due to ill health. He continued to decline and died on November 10, 1920. Five days later, Brackenridge was appointed to Littlefield's seat. With Littlefield dead, it looked as if Brackenridge's dream campus would now materialize. But then, Littlefield's will was read. He had left over $1 million in assets to the university that would either be lost or reduced in usefulness if the campus was moved. Five hundred thousand dollars were earmarked for construction of a new Main Building that could be located no where else. Another $300,000 was allocated to build a women's dormitory on lots he owned that adjoined the campus, but if the main campus relocated within 21 years of his death, the property would revert to his estate. Two hundred thousand dollars was to be spent building a grand entrance on the South Mall that would include statues of prominent Southerners like Jeff Davis, Bobby Lee, Albert Sidney Johnson, John H. Reagan, Jim Hogg, and Woodrow Wilson. A few hours before passing, he threw in his mansion, subject to his wife's life interest.
As Marilyn McAdams Sibley wrote in her biography of Brackenridge, George W. Brackenridge, "The will threw Brackenridge into a quandry, as Littlefield intended, and possibly shortened his life. To carry out his plans would mean to forfeit the larger portion of Littlefield's bequest to the university, something that went against the grain of a practical man. Moreover, if he provoked that forfeiture, it behooved him to replace the loss, something he could not afford to do in late 1920. His fortune, far from being the $3 or $4 million that Vinson estimated, was less than $1.5 million, including his home, personal effects, and household furnishings. If he forced the removal and gave all of his assets toward the new buildings, he could do little more than compensate for the loss of the Littlefield gifts; and to give all to the university would mean to neglect kinsmen, dependents, and others who expected to be remembered in his will."
In December, 1920, Brackenridge fell ill, and died on the evening of December 22. At this point university president Vinson must have felt like he had died and gone to heaven. Having inherited a healthy chunk of the Littlefield estate, he now anticipated between $3 million and $4 million from the Brackenridge estate. Brackenridge had promised as much in 1913. Vinson, who was very much in favor of moving the campus to the Brackenridge tract, hated to lose so much of the Littlefield money, but figured the University would come out ahead with the Brackenridge bonanza. But when the will was found, U.T. was left out in the cold. Brackenridge's estate had been put in trust, providing lifetime incomes for a group of relatives, dependents, and friends, with anything left over to be used for educational purposes.
The disappointed Vinson and Board of Regents pressed on with the campaign to move the campus. Campus-area businesses, churches, and boarding houses protested the loss of commerce that relocation would bring. Lawyers questioned the validity of the deed to the Brackenridge tract, and in the middle of a recession, thrifty Texans asked, why lose the Littlefield bequest in order to move to a campus that would have to paid for from scratch? But the most dangerous proposition of all was one that would throw the relocation game open to any Texas city willing to pony up $10 million and 500 acres, and let the voters of Texas decide where the university went. Ex-governor Ferguson offered 2,500 acres in Bosque County and promised to raise $1 million for buildings.
The legislature instructed Vinson to map out the boundaries of an adequate campus adjacent to the Forty Acres and it would think about finding some money to buy the property; it eventually dug up $1.35 million.
But all this quibbling over mere tens of thousands of dollars was about to end, for in 1923 the Santa Rita No. 1 oil well blew in on the university's patch of the west Texas Sahara, which Brackenridge had so carefully shepherded for years.
And so the campus stayed where it was, giving rise to all the high-rise dorms, parking tickets, and traffic jams the university is famous for today. Littlefield's brand is all over the campus: the Littlefield Fountain and South Mall, Littlefield Dormitory, and the Littlefield Mansion. But because of the university's continued growth, Littlefield's grand entrance is just another wide spot on campus, and in this age of political correctness, there have been calls to remove the statues of Littlefield's cherished Southern statesmen, or at least supplement them with heroes from other cultural and ethnic groups. As for Brackenridge, B Hall was demolished in 1952. His name has been relegated to the Brackenridge tract by the river and an adjoining student housing project. The university even found a way to get around his deed restriction regarding use of the Brackenridge tract. When the regents planned an apartment project on the land in the 1960s, the finance agency questioned the land title. So the regents got the legislature to pass laws that purchased Jackson County's reversionary interest in 1966.
President Vinson summed up the differences between the two Georges from the university's perspective in 1940: "When Mr. Brackenridge spoke of the University of Texas, he always emphasized the word University. Major Littlefield emphasized the word Texas. One was primarily concerned with the policies of the insitution, the other with the people whom it served."