John Wesley Hardin: Reconstruction-era desperado

One of Texas' major outlaw icons from the Reconstruction era was John Wesley Hardin, who became a fugitive after murdering a black man in East Texas, then joined in Northeast Texas blood feuds on the side of anti-union clans against federalist supporters. Read this fine essay by Edward Southerland in the Sherman Herald Democrat on Hardin's criminal career for a flavor of that important period. (UPDATE: Here's part two.)

It's still astonishing to me how many aspects of Texas politics and culture to this day are influenced by ideologies prevalent during the war to end slavery and Reconstruction. After the Civil War, thousands of southerners fleeing Yankee occupation placed signs reading "GTT" on their homes -- "Gone To Texas" -- and headed west. Huge numbers came who were burned out by Gen. Sherman in Georgia, but also die-hard rebel holdouts from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc., fled to the Texas frontier in droves.

Without knowing that history, it's really hard to understand local political attitudes in places like Brownwood, Tyler, Plano and Wichita Falls, where one still occasionally sees bumper stickers promising "The South Will Rise Again," and rebel battle flags are still a local icon. Most of the rebel migrants came through northeast Texas, and thousands settled there. Before long, the area become a hotbed of the most radical ex-confederate sympathizers to be found anywhere. Hardin's terrible crimes were committed in the midst of that embittered political stew, though politics cannot justfy them. His importance as an icon, though -- a hero to the southerners and an enemy of the state -- can hardly be separated from the zeitgeist of the times.