History/Parenting

Elections often produce the unexpected. Obscure candidates sometimes come from nowhere to beat well-known and Ken Bridges established candidates. And at other times, honest men are bested by scoundrels. The 1838 presidential election in Texas became a tragic contest that saw the deaths of two prominent candidates with promising futures.

President Sam Houston was completing his first term in 1838 amid declining popularity. With Texas flirting with bankruptcy as the result of the Texas Revolution and difficulty establishing trade relations with other nations, Houston had been forced to veto a number of popular measures in an effort to save money. In addition, his policies of peace with the Native American tribes had frustrated many settlers.

Under the terms of the Texas Constitution, the term of the first elected president of the Republic of Texas would only be two years. Each term afterward (though many Texans expected a quick annexation to the United States) would be three years. It would be a straight popular vote without an electoral college. The constitution of the Texas Republic also specified that a president could serve as many terms as the voters would allow, but the president could not serve consecutive terms. As a result, Houston was not able to run for re-election. Houston’s policies. As a former newspaper publisher and Georgia legislator, for example, he had supported the expulsion of Native American tribes from the state.

Pro-Houston forces faced one tragedy after another in their search for a successor to Houston. Secretary of War Thomas J. Rusk had attracted a lot of attention for a presidential run. The South Carolina native and future U. S. Senator declined.

Many Houston supporters looked to James Collinsworth. Collinsworth was born in Tennessee in 1806. He rose to become the United States Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee before he headed to Texas. He distinguished himself at the battle of San Jacinto and became the first Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court in 1836. He decided to run for the presidency in 1838, but his alcoholism took its toll. He had gone on a long drinking binge in Galveston before leaping off the top of a steamboat to his death at the mere age of 32.

The third potential candidate was Peter W. Grayson. He was born in Kentucky in 1788 and eventually became a state legislator. However, he suffered from bouts of depression for which at that time were few remedies. He helped raised troops for the Texas Revolution and became Houston’s attorney general in 1837. Grayson reluctantly agreed to run at Houston’s urging. In June, he began a diplomatic trip to Washington, DC, but by July when he reached Tennessee, he shot himself in a tavern near Knoxville.

No political parties existed in the Republic of Texas, but the politics of the day was divided on a personalist basis: supporters of Houston and opponents of Houston. Vice-President Mirabeau B. Lamar had effectively become the head of the anti-Houston faction. Given the continuing threat from Mexico and memories of how Mexico’s own political divisions had left it in a state of near-constant civil war also fed the pragmatic desire to keep partisanship in check.

Lamar, a Georgia native, hoped to establish Texas as a great, independent power though Texas did not have the means to make this happen at that point. He was fiercely critical of Texas counties are now named for all three men.

As a result of the deaths of the two prominent Texas politicians, Lamar was effectively the last candidate remaining. Only one candidate opposed Lamar, Sen. Robert Wilson. Wilson was nicknamed “Honest Bob” because he always promised his constituentsthathewouldbejustashonest as the circumstances permitted. Lamar won the election by a crushing margin, winning 6,995 votes to only 252 for Honest Bob.

As president, Lamar’s grandiose plans ended in failure. Houston would recapture the presidency in 1841. Q: In certain of your books as well as your newspaper column, you have written that children as young as three should be John Rosemond doing daily chores around the home. Exactly what chores are reasonable for that age child?

A: First, a personal anecdote: My mother kept a scrapbook of my early years that contained photos, notes, and other such memorabilia. Browsing through it one day, I found a photograph she had taken with her Brownie camera of me washing the kitchen floor in our tiny apartment on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina. On the reverse side of the photo Mom had written a date indicating that I was three years and six months old at the time.

When I asked her about it, Mom told me that I enjoyed doing housework and that teaching me to wash a floor had been straightforward and easily accomplished. She also emphasized that she had held me to a fairly high standard. If I did a sloppy job of floorwashing, she had me do it over again. Such was “parenting” –actually, it was known as simply “childrearing” back then –before it became necessary to clap and squeal over anything a child did to ensure the continuing inflation of self-esteem.

My training in proper husband-hood continued. By age five, before I started first grade (Kindergarten was not universal in South Carolina in the early 1950s), I was occasionally washing my own clothing in Mom’s “washing machine,” which consisted of a large, galvanized tub with hand rollers bolted to it. And again, there were enforced standards. “Do it right the first time and you won’t have to do it again,” became my motto.

The point of this reminiscence is that young children are more capable than most folks, apparently, think them to be. I was not a chore-savant at three. I was simply trained properly, which is to say, patiently but with calm insistence that I do the job to the best of my ability. Let’s face it, washing a floor is about as basic as it gets. Dip sponge, wring, put on floor, wipe, dip, wring, etc. Besides, my mother’s purpose was not to have me do the job as well as she would have done it, but to teach me a fundamental citizenship skill as well as the value of a clean and tidy environment. As we Boomers were told (but few children, these days, hear), “Good citizenship begins in the home.” As for washing clothes in a tub, it was a simple matter of grabbing two handfuls of fabric and rubbing them together until the grass stains were eradicated. Again, not complicated.

My lessons in home management continued after Mom’s remarriage. One summer, at age twelve, I painted our split-level home. Thankfully, we were then living in a Chicago suburb where it was not quite as humid as Charleston and my water, courtesy of an actual refrigerator-freezer (as opposed to the Charleston ice box), was iced. (One of my more vivid early memories is the regular visits of the iceman with his tongs.)

Teaching children that there is no such thing as a free lunch, that consumption must be balanced with contribution, is essential to the maintenance of a civil society. I can’t quite wrap my head around thinking one’s youngster is a genius and yet expecting virtually nothing from him. After all, one truly respects a child by expecting, reasonably, of him.

Family psychologist John Rosemond:johnrosemond.com,parentguru. com.

John Rosemond has worked with families, children, and parents since 1971 in the field of family psychology. In 1971, John earned his masters in psychology from Western Illinois University and was elected to the Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.