Davis, three carpenters, and a laborer were residing, apparently in a boarding house, with Tomasa Benavides and her children when the census was taken that year.

He next sailed to Washington, D.C., where President Abraham Lincoln issued him a colonel's commission with the authority to recruit the 1st Texas Cavalry Regiment (Union).

[6] Davis was among those present when General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Confederate forces in Texas on June 2, 1865.

Both Davis and Montgomery quickly gathered up a few of their things and headed to Hamilton Pool, just outside of Austin, where they hid out before deciding to meet up with other Union soldiers in Matamoros, Mexico.

[citation needed] After setting up camp in Matamoros, Montgomery discovered that Confederate forces planned to come across the border to arrest Davis.

The State Police were to have extraordinary powers, including taking offenders from one county to another for trial and of operating undercover as secret agents.

[7] It worked against racially based crimes, and included black police officers, which caused protest from former slaveowners (and future segregationists).

One of his protégés was Norris Wright Cuney of Galveston, who continued the struggle for equality until his own death in 1898 and is honored as one of the important figures in Texas and American black history.

Though Davis was highly unpopular among former Confederates, and most material written about him for many years was unfavorable, he was considered to have been a hero for the Union Army.

When President Grant refused to send troops to the defeated governor's rescue, Davis reluctantly left the capital in January 1874.

His name was placed in nomination for Vice President of the United States at the 1880 Republican National Convention, which met in Chicago and chose James A. Garfield as the standard-bearer.

Had Davis succeeded, he might have wound up in the White House, as did Chester A. Arthur, the man who received the vice presidential nomination that year.

After Democrats regained power in the state legislature, they passed laws making voter registration more difficult, such as requiring payment of poll taxes, which worked to disfranchise blacks, Mexican Americans and poor whites.

[10][failed verification] As Texas became essentially a one-party state, the white primary excluded minorities from the political competitive process.

677 (7 June 1872); digital images, “A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875,” Library of Congress, American Memory (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html : accessed 28 Sep 2014).

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 2: 43; digital images, Google Books (http://books.google.com : accessed 28 Sep 2014).

↩ Stanley S. McGowen, Horse Sweat and Powder Smoke: The First Texas Cavalry in the Civil War (College Station, Tex.