George T. Ruby: Champion of Equal Rights in Reconstruction Texas by Carl H. Moneyhon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: George T. Ruby: Champion of Equal Rights in Reconstruction Texas by Carl H. Moneyhon Brian Matthew Jordan George T. Ruby: Champion of Equal Rights in Reconstruction Texas. By Carl H. Moneyhon. ( Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2020. Pp. 413. Notes, bibliography, index.) Though his life spanned just four decades, George Thompson Ruby earned the esteem of Black leaders in post–Civil War America. From Haiti [End Page 132] to New Orleans to Texas, where he became a charter member of the state's Black political leadership class during Reconstruction, Ruby toiled for equal rights and a more inclusive democracy. "George Ruby was not the sort of man Texas history traditionally has seen as a hero," Carl Moneyhon comments in this diligently researched biography, the first cradle-to-grave treatment of its subject. "Still, there was something heroic about him" (361). Quarrying period newspapers and previously untapped manuscript sources, Moneyhon recalls a life that well illustrates the promise and betrayals of Reconstruction. The biography opens by recalling the reformist zeal of George's father, Reuben, who became his son's exemplar. George Ruby was also shaped by his formal education; in 1859, he became the first Black high school graduate in his adopted hometown of Portland, Maine. Extant sources do not allow much access to Ruby's personal life, but this early context permits certain hallmarks of his character to come into focus. Just weeks before the rebels bombarded Fort Sumter into submission, young George Ruby set sail for Haiti, where he hoped fellow U.S. emigrants might realize their dream of equality and self-government. Ruby became one of the most enthusiastic boosters of the project, producing a blizzard of rosy missives for periodicals back home. Despite Ruby's best efforts, the short-lived emigration scheme came to grief. Letting up on none of his energies, Ruby promptly relocated to New Orleans and went to work teaching the formerly enslaved population in the city and its rural hinterlands. When chronic underfunding and White resistance enfeebled Louisiana's freedmen's schools, Ruby moved to Galveston. In Texas, Ruby found an outlet for his innate political ambition. He became an early organizer for the Loyal League and Republican Party. He scored an appointment as inspector for the Freedmen's Bureau, a position that obliged him to canvass the state, survey conditions on the ground, and report on his findings. This work not only offered a primer on local White antagonism to Reconstruction, but also helped Ruby to foster personal connections with new Black voters. As one of ten Black delegates tapped for the state constitutional convention in 1868, Ruby sat on key committees and sought to enshrine in the final document fundamental guarantees of equal rights. Ruby also aligned himself with his party's radical wing in efforts to divide the state and disfranchise former rebels. In 1869, voters sent him to the Texas Senate, where he became a reliable champion of Governor Edmund J. Davis's legislative agenda. Despite his skills as an orator, faculties as a writer, and talents as a legislator, Ruby ultimately proved unable to build a truly biracial coalition—or to reach beyond his Black base of support. The conservative press heaped opprobrium on Ruby (in a telling sign of his significance). His own Republican Party was hopelessly divided on Black civil rights. The political [End Page 133] headwinds facing those who dared to create a biracial democracy in Texas gathered even more force in 1871, when a newly emboldened Democratic Party emerged, auguring the return of the state legislature to Democratic control the following year. Ruby's lifelong, relentless optimism now yielded to grim resignation. He returned to Louisiana, but there, too, violence and factionalism finished off Reconstruction. On the masthead of the short-lived Republican campaign newspaper he published in 1872, Ruby declared, "Mindful of Right, We Dare to be True" (280–281). It could have been his epitaph. For recovering a remarkable life and skillfully situating it amid the period's political complexities, Texas historians and Reconstruction scholars are once more indebted to Carl Moneyhon. Brian Matthew Jordan Sam Houston State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association