Imagining Texas: the creation in nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals of a rhetoric of Texas

Abstract

Texas is a place on maps, a state, a former independent nation; it is also a rhetoric. Visit Texas, "It's like a whole other country," touts the visitor's bureau; but they are not specifying geographical location, rather a rhetorical identity. Texas rhetoric can be described as individualistic, heroic, prideful, even exotic. This rhetoric, a kind of verbal map or code or system of thinking, like all rhetorics, is human-made, created out of rhetorics that existed previously. When Texas was first settled by Anglo-Americans in the 1820s, there was no rhetoric of Texas, no unified verbal identity for the place and the people who made homes there. But Texas already had the outlines of a rhetorical map. In the perception of emigrants, Texas was a place of mysterious vastness, a place paradoxically wilderness and garden, a place of opportunity which might be home to hardy, enterprising, and intelligent freemen. Those who came to Texas began to detail the rhetorical map in the day-to-day ways they described Texas and the culture developing there. But it was largely in the forum of the early Texas newspapers between 1829 and 1836 that the Texas rhetoric was practiced, adjusted, and formed. It was also influenced by articles and books about Texas which were published elsewhere during this period. This developing rhetoric borrowed images which were part of the cultural milieu of the era, such as garden and wilderness, heroism, and "otherness." And these images became "fixed" as part of Texas rhetoric by the violence of the Texas Revolution, a dramatic and traumatic event which tore the fabric of the verbal representations of Texas as a peaceful, agrarian, and close-knit society, an event that required a powerful rhetoric to make its effects understandable. Early Texas rhetoric has been overlaid with images of the cowboy, the oilman, and others; but the essential character of early rhetorical images have endured.