James W. Throckmorton

James Webb Throckmorton (1825 to 1894) was a physician, legislator and soldier from Collin County who served as governor of Texas from August 1866 until the federal military commander removed him from office in the summer of 1867.¹² One of the few delegates to the Secession Convention who voted against leaving the Union, he later commanded Confederate troops on the frontier, led the convention of 1866, and after his removal returned to public life as a member of Congress.¹

Early life

Throckmorton was born at Sparta, Tennessee, on February 1, 1825, one of eight children of Susan Jane Rotan and William Edward Throckmorton, a physician.¹ The family moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1836 and settled in Collin County, Texas, in 1841, near the East Fork of the Trinity River; his father died within a year.¹ He studied medicine with an uncle in Princeton, Kentucky, and returned to Texas to serve in the Mexican War, first as a private and then as a surgeon’s assistant in a company of Texas Rangers, until illness ended his service in June 1847.¹ The kidney disease that appeared then troubled him for the rest of his life.¹

He married Annie Rattan in Illinois in February 1848 and practiced medicine near McKinney. He found the work distasteful, read law, and joined a McKinney firm.¹

State legislator and Unionist

Throckmorton won the first of three terms in the Texas House of Representatives in 1851, representing a district that took in Collin and Denton counties. As chairman of the Internal Improvement Committee he favored land grants for public schools and for a statewide railroad network.¹ He entered the Texas Senate in 1857, a Democrat after the collapse of the Whig party, and supported Sam Houston against the states’ rights wing of that party.¹

At the Secession Convention of 1861 he was one of only eight delegates who voted against withdrawal from the Union.¹ When the Lincoln administration offered military support for resistance inside Texas, he advised Houston against it, arguing that the state might not survive a civil war within its own borders.¹

Civil War

Once Texas had left the Union, Throckmorton helped raise a company of mounted riflemen from Collin County in May 1861 and later served with the Sixth Texas Cavalry in the battles of Chustennallah and Elkhorn and in Mississippi. Illness forced his discharge in September 1863.¹ He returned to the state senate in 1864, was commissioned brigadier general of the First Frontier District that December, and in 1865 negotiated treaties with frontier tribes as Confederate commissioner to American Indians.¹

Governor

Collin County sent him to the Constitutional Convention of 1866, where the votes of secessionists and conservative Unionists made him chairman over the radical candidate.¹ The document it produced extended limited civil rights to freedpeople without giving them the vote.¹ In the June 1866 election Throckmorton defeated Elisha M. Pease by a margin of roughly four to one.¹³ Accounts differ on the day he took office that August: his Handbook biography gives August 9, while the Legislative Reference Library begins his term on a later day that month.¹²

His administration clashed with the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau over civil authority, the protection of freedpeople and the defense of the frontier, and he publicly repudiated the Fourteenth Amendment.¹³ After the First Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, placed Texas under military command, General Charles Griffin pressed him to protect Black Texans and to support congressional policy, and he refused.¹³ On Griffin’s request, General Philip H. Sheridan ordered his removal on July 30, 1867, as an impediment to Reconstruction, and named Pease in his place; Pease took office on August 8.²³ The wider sequence is set out in the overview of Reconstruction in Texas, and the Republican elected governor in 1869 is profiled under Edmund J. Davis.

Later career

Prohibited from holding office until the General Amnesty Act of 1872, he resumed practice at McKinney and in 1870 joined former governors Andrew J. Hamilton and Pease in signing a public statement against Radical Republican policy.¹ He was elected to Congress in 1874 and 1876, pressed there for education and for federal aid to railroad building, and worked for the Texas and Pacific Railway Company.¹ He lost a bid for the governor’s nomination at the Democratic state convention of 1878, returned to Congress in the election of 1882 and was reelected in 1884 and 1886, then declined to run in 1888 because of his health.¹ He died at McKinney on April 21, 1894, after a fall on a business trip, and the town later raised a statue in his honor.¹

Sources and later study

David Minor wrote the Handbook of Texas article on Throckmorton.¹ At the 2026 annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association, Kenneth W. Howell of Blinn College, author of a biography of Throckmorton, presented a paper on his governorship in a panel on three governors; Rosser Newton spoke in the same session on his biography of Richard Coke.⁴ Other figures of the period are listed in the reference index.

References

1. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Throckmorton, James Webb ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴

2. Legislative Reference Library of Texas, Governor James W. Throckmorton ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Reconstruction ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting, The Lives and Forgotten Times of Governors Coke, Throckmorton and Roberts ↩