his sixties. “Barker is a young fellow, perhaps 26, rather ‘green’ looking, but pleasant,” Bolton wrote. Bolton's teaching load was relatively light: two European history courses in three sections that each met thrice weekly. His university accommodations included a “beautiful recitation room, with good maps and a private office,” in Old Main, which in Bolton's time was still comparatively new.
Garrison had some “odds and ends” for Bolton in addition to teaching. Founding editor of the Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, Garrison gave Bolton editorial assignments. The new instructor did not complain. Garrison was “building up a centre for southwestern history for which Texas has unsurpassed opportunities,” Bolton thought. He quickly intuited that Garrison would encourage him to work in this new field, southwestern history. “I shall get up Spanish at once, which they say is easy.” All in all, Bolton thought he had “fallen into good quarters” where he thought he could rise to the top.24 For the first time Bolton believed that he was well positioned to succeed in his chosen profession.
Bolton liked Austin. The October weather was “perfect.” The city was “a big village in type and appearance, the good and bad all mixed.” The capitol impressed him. He lodged in “a ‘swell’ residence” where Garrison had put him “to avoid making a social error before I get started.” He noticed that almost everyone rode single footers (horses with an unusually quick and comfortable gait almost as fast as a trot). They were “common as niggers,” he wrote, an unfortunate choice of terms that signaled Bolton's quick assimilation of white southern sensibilities and values.25 “I like the southern people extremely well,” he told his brother. He found them to be “kind, courteous, hospitable,” and the students “much more courteous than in the north.”26 He did not mention that the university was racially segregated.
Moving to Texas to teach European history for a fifty-dollar raise had been a gamble. Once he surveyed the situation in Austin, Bolton knew that he had won his bet. Now he could specialize in history instead of teaching everything under the sun. Noticing that he was a more demanding teacher than either Garrison or Barker, he decided to modify his own teaching so that he would have more time for research. Even the administration stars seemed to be aligned in Bolton's favor. President Prather's association with Penn probably helped Bolton, who judged Prather to be an “honest, warmhearted, provincial man” who would “give one free scope.” The Board of Regents had treated Bolton “liberally,” paying him from September 1, rather than docking his pay for the days he had missed while waiting for his daughter's birth.27 Texas was going to be a good thing for Bolton, and Bolton intended to be a good thing for Texas.
But the University of Texas was not quite as calm as it seemed in Bolton's first appraisal. The university had been embroiled in political controversies concerning funding, its relationship with Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, and whether the university should serve the immediate, practical needs of the state's farmers or less concrete but loftier scholarly goals. Funding of the university by munificent land grants and oil revenues would eventually secure its future, but this inchoate treasury was also a source of political conflict.28
The university was vulnerable to powerful political figures in Austin. In 1897 a state representative asserted that some university professors “not in sympathy with the traditions of the South” were teaching “political heresies in place of the system of political economy” cherished by Texans. A house committee investigated the charges. They questioned professor of political science David F. Houston, and Garrison. Both men assured the legislators that nothing was being taught that reflected poorly “on Southern institutions or that would be unacceptable to Southern people.” The committee closely questioned Houston (a South Carolinian) about his Harvard University Press book on nullification in South Carolina, which the committee believed to be “unacceptable from a Southern standpoint,” and “contrary to Southern teachings.”29 Houston explained that he had written the book before coming to Texas and that he did not assign it or refer to it in his classes. The committee learned that the regents hired faculty on the basis of fitness rather than which region they haled from. Nevertheless, “other things being equal,” the regents hired “Texas men first and Southern men next.” The committee was satisfied that nothing was taught at the university that was “objectionable to Southern people,” but called for an annual investigation of the university by the state legislature to make certain that this happy circumstance was not disturbed. The regents appended a statement to the report that no political or religious tests were used in the selection of faculty, who were expected to be “in sympathy with the people whom they teach,” and that while the university “was in no sense partisan, sectarian, or sectional,” it was “in sympathy with the life, character, and civilization of the Southern people.”30
At about the time Bolton arrived in Austin, controversies had arisen concerning certain professors’ interpretations of historical events and other educational matters. Representatives from church-supported colleges complained that some University of Texas professors held unorthodox religious views that “inculcated infidel ideas in the minds of the students,” as one observer put it.31 Other critics had complained that a professor of political science had said uncomplimentary things about the free coinage of silver, a key plank in the 1896 platform of the Democratic and Populist Parties, one that had strong support in Texas and the West. To eliminate the possibility of professors expressing such unpopular opinions, some newspapers advocated the elimination of the university's political science chair. Happily, the regents decided against that drastic measure. However, a member of the Board of Regents grilled the errant professor, and he agreed not to mention the topic of silver again.
Another Texas professor, speaking at a teachers’ meeting in Denver, made the flabbergasting mistake of saying that it was a good thing that the South had lost the Civil War. “The great question in the South is the lifting up of the colored man to citizenship,” the professor argued. “And it is being done,” he added. He spoke in defense of southern states (including Texas) restricting the political rights of African Americans, but this did not mollify Texans with diehard Confederate sympathies. Race relations were a touchy subject in turn-of-the-century Texas, a former slave state where racially motivated lynching was common.32 The Board of Regents excused the incident by claiming that it had been an impromptu address on the subject of “southern patriotism” given on short notice. If the gentleman had had more time to reflect before speaking, the regents implied, he would not have uttered such inflammatory statements. All of these incidents led J. J. Lane, a University of Texas professor, to write in his 1903 History of Education in Texas that he disapproved of student and (in some cases) faculty participation in politics. Such activities could only harm the university.33
As in many other public institutions at the turn of the previous century, the University of Texas faculty were judged by bedrock cultural assumptions, shifting political currents, and the whims of crafty politicians. According to Garrison, political controversy involving President Prather's predecessor George T. Winston had caused “such a storm” that “two years of [Prather's] wise and sympathetic administration have hardly enabled us to orient ourselves.”34 Garrison had been personally involved in those controversies and in helping to right the ship after Prather's arrival in 1899. He must have worried about how the Yankee Bolton would fit in. Surely he would never allow Bolton to teach anything about his doctoral specialty, free blacks in the South. The astute Bolton must have soon realized that his dissertation was a dead letter in Austin. If he objected to abandoning the field he had pioneered, he never mentioned it.
In the fall of 1901 Bolton simply put his head down and went to work in the classroom and on the Quarterly.35 Meanwhile Garrison wrote a report on the status of historical studies on the southwestern United States for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. He sketched the regional situation in broad terms but concentrated on research activities in Texas, especially the acquisition of the important Bexar Archives. Garrison thought there was still more to be discovered in Mexico, which he had scouted in the summer of 1900.36 “No
