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  • Texas | Columns | "Texas Tales"

    Volney Erskine Howard

    by Mike Cox
    Mike Cox

    Reading vintage newspapers, it’s not hard to see how Texans early on helped to develop the long-standing notion that people from the Lone Star State are folks with whom it is best not to mess.

    Take Volney Erskine Howard, newly elected to represent his Texas district in the U.S. Congress. A lawyer and newspaperman originally from Maine, Howard came to Texas from Mississippi in 1844, settling in San Antonio. He practiced law there and after Texas became the 28th state, he gained election to the Texas Legislature as a representative.

    In 1849, Howard successfully ran for a seat in Congress. Some time that August, he left Texas for Washington to be sworn in as a freshman member of the House. Back then, the 1,600- mile trip from the Alamo City to the District of Columbia meant a lot of time sitting in a stagecoach.

    The 40-year-old Howard made it as far as Alabama before demonstrating that he was as capable of upholding the rule of law on a physical level as he was at arguing a point of order before the bar.

    As one newspaper later reported, the Congressman-elect was traveling with a judge from New York, the French minister to Texas and his secretary, and a man who happened to be a correspondent for the Boston Post. The man driving their coach, the reporter wrote, was “one of those miserable drunken Alabama stage drivers.”

    The reinsman was so intoxicated that he somehow overturned the coach. No one got hurt – at least not in the accident.

    “After righting the coach, and picking up the broken fragments, Col. Howard pleasantly remarked to the driver, ‘This is rather careless for the middle of the day, driver,’” the newspaperman wrote.

    The stageman apparently did not appreciate the constructive criticism offered by the honorable gentleman from Texas.

    “It is, is it?” the driver said, drawing “a large horse pistol” and sticking the barrel against Howard’s chest. The driver seemed about to end Howard’s national political career before it began when the Texas lawmaker “lit upon him.”

    “Such an awful blow as he dealt this driver I never did see!” the Massachusetts reporter wrote. “He ‘rattled his bones over the stones’ right merrily, while the chap went round like a top. Why he knocked out four of the fellow’s teeth and threw him from one side of the road to the other.”

    While the fight was on and the handgun still up for grabs, the reporter’s survival instincts told him to run, but his appreciation of the Texan’s manhandling of the stagecoach driver got the best of him and he stayed for the full bout.

    “It looked savage,” the journalist said of the driver’s pistol, “but the colonel soon took it away…, tied [the driver’s] hands behind him, and took the reins himself.”

    The new Congressman from San Antonio drove the stage to the nearest stage stop (the reporter called it a “change,” as in where the teams got changed) and presented the restrained driver to the agent in charge. The agent “took our names for the purpose of making an example of this driver by prosecution, and very politely took us on himself some 30 miles, when we gave him a good supper, and we left him to proceed to Montgomery.”

    Howard made it the rest of the way to Washington without incident and went on to represent Bexar County in the 31st and 32nd Congress before former governor Peter Hansborough Bell defeated him in his bid for a third term in 1853. With an appointment from President Franklin Pierce as an attorney for the federal California Land Commission, Howard soon left Texas for good.

    He later served as the Golden State’s attorney general, eventually becoming a trial judge and finally an appeals court judge. Late in life he got offered an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court but he declined a seat on the nation’s high court due to his age. He died at 80 in Santa Monica in 1889 and is buried in Los Angeles.

    Though he only spent eight years in Texas, the former congressman must have left behind plenty of friends. When the legislature created 54 new counties in West Texas in 1876, one of them was named in Howard’s honor when it was finally organized in 1882.

    (Author’s note: My thanks to Austin researcher and friend Sloan Rodgers, who ran across the story of Howard’s Alabama experience in the Sept. 29, 1849 edition of the Texas State Gazette and graciously shared it with me.)


    © Mike Cox -
    April 5 , 2012 column
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