"We the Ladies": Collective Petitioning by Women in Antebellum and Civil War Texas

Abstract

"We the Ladies":Collective Petitioning by Women in Antebellum and Civil War Texas Daniel Hale (bio) On June 20, 1862, Colonel Thomas Carothers, the superintendent of the Texas State Penitentiary, was visited by an apparently tearful Frederika Riebeling, who successfully urged him to change his mind and follow the example of his two predecessors in supporting her campaign to secure a pardon for her husband, Charles. Frederika had been pardoned from the penitentiary a few years earlier for the same crime as her husband. Her release had been secured, in part, by a collective petitioning campaign by women of the Texas social elite. Frederika Riebeling subsequently gained the support of some of the most influential Texan men for the clemency application on behalf of Charles, including former governor Sam Houston. Thomas Carothers explained his volte-face in a letter to Governor Lubbock as a chivalrous response to Mrs. Riebeling's distress. The case of Frederika and Charles Riebeling provides a vantage point from which to explore the role of women in petitioning for clemency in early statehood Texas, revealing new insights into collective campaigning by women from the social elite in the antebellum South. This article will show that some women in antebellum Texas, enabled by their social standing, did engage in collective petitioning on certain public matters and that their ability to intervene in that sphere might not have been so limited as formerly believed. Its argument is derived from wider research on the discourse employed in petitions for executive clemency sent to the governors of Texas during the period of early [End Page 199] statehood and the Civil War. Central to this research were the petitions made on behalf of people convicted of offenses against the criminal code of Texas, and this study explores the language employed by petitioners in their clemency applications to provide new perspectives on Texas and its development as a society during this period.1 A robust culture of petitioning existed among Texan men during early statehood and large numbers could be mobilized to sign a clemency petition.2 While the citizens who organized petition campaigns were often members of the state's professional or farming elite, their fellow petitioners were drawn from all strata of society. In some cases, they sought clemency for an errant scion of an elite family, but oftentimes the object of their compassion was a poor laboring man, a widow, and even a slave. Some petitioners sought clemency out of blatant self-interest (for example, the planter seeking the return of his convicted slave "property"), but often, their words evinced a simple human compassion and the desire to establish a just and civilized society on a new frontier.3 The deployment of petitions and the language of clemency texts in the frontier state of Texas reveals that attitudes to the rule of law differed in some respects from those in more easterly states, such as described by Laura Edwards in her study of the Carolinas after the American Revolution.4 Texans were apparently more reluctant to manipulate the operation of law at a local level at first instance than the citizens of the Carolinas. The clemency files demonstrate that the citizens of Texas would adhere to the strict letter of the law at the prosecution stage, even when it conflicted with their own localized, and particularized, sense of justice; however, after trial and conviction, they would seek justice in individual cases through petitions for executive clemency.5 There was a marked consensus amongst [End Page 200] citizens of all social backgrounds on the need to establish the rule of law by strict adherence to its provisions at the prosecution and trial stages. Executive clemency provided a means by which the harshness of the law in individual cases could be ameliorated.6 Clemency petitions from this period of Texas history display a widespread adherence to certain formulaic drafting conventions. Petitioners from across the state adopted very similar forms of address when beginning their appeals for mercy: "We the undersigned citizens" and "[t]he undersigned citizens of the County" were common prefaces to a petition.7 Yet these few words were replete with meaning: first...