Our recent archeological investigations at the home of Gen. Thomas Jefferson Chambers (once called Chambersea or Chambersia) have sparked my interest in the man for whom Chambers County was named. His home, or what’s left of it, is still preserved in Anahuac, commemorated with a 1936 granite historical marker dedicated to the man himself. The text of marker is brief, and pointedly highlights Chambers' most noteworthy achievements.
Surveyor General of Texas, 1829. Sole superior judge of Texas before 1836. Active in the cause of independence. Member of Secession Convention, 1861. Chambersea, later Anahuac, and a Texas county were named in his honor.
But this is Texas, folks, where stories are never simple. Underlying the glorification of one of Texas’ founding fathers lurks a darker, more complex story. It is a tale of ambition, opportunism, scheming, and vendetta. It is a tale that ends in Chambers’ own murder on a warm March night in 1865. He was upstairs in his parlor holding his infant daughter when a shot came through an open window, striking him down. The unknown assassin was never identified or caught. Indeed, in those days when frontier justice still prevailed, it seems as though very little effort was even made to apprehend anyone. The fact is, Thomas Jefferson Chambers was not a well-liked man.
Great Expectations
Thomas Jefferson Chambers was born in Virginia in 1802 to a once-wealthy planter named Thomas Chambers. He was the youngest of 20 children. Chambers’ father died in 1815 leaving his household in shambles and his family essentially destitute. Chambers’ mother, Mary Gore Chambers, moved to Kentucky to be near family. While Mary attempted to sort out her late husband’s affairs, her youngest child was left to fend for himself. For a short time, Chambers attended boarding school, but ultimately the family could not pay the tuition. Working as a teacher himself, the teenage Chambers managed to eventually put himself through school to study law. By the time he completed his studies, he was heavily in debt to friends and neighbors. These early misfortunes profoundly shaped his actions and attitudes in later years. When he was finally able to discharge his early debts nearly 17 years later, he described feelings of great relief in his diary, adding, “The early indiscretion of contracting these debts have affected my whole life, and they have hung over me like a drawn sword. (Diary of Thomas Jefferson Chambers March 4, 1837)”
For the rest of his life, Chambers was singularly obsessed with consolidating land, wealth, and social position. By all accounts he excelled at it. As a young man, he displayed a particular talent for cultivating the patronage of important men. At the age of 17 he wrote an unsolicited letter to Thomas Jefferson, his namesake, seeking counsel:
Early taught by my father, to venerate you, now he is taken from me, I solicit a correspondence with you, that I may, by your wisdom and experience, become wise also. I am now at the most critical period of my life, my circumstances are embarrassed, my passions are violent and ungovernable, and without the advice of an intelligent friend, I am, continually liable to be led by them into errors both of thought and action (Letter from Thomas Jefferson Chambers to Thomas Jefferson August 27, 1819).
In 1823 after completing his schooling, he left Kentucky for Alabama where he managed to obtain sponsorship from the newly appointed Alabama Supreme Court Justice, Abner Lipscomb. He passed the bar there and by 1826 he set off for Mexico, where he tutored English and translated documents for Mexican businessmen. Leveraging his networking skills, at some point Chambers became acquainted with the vice-governor of Coahuila y Tejas and impressed the vice-governor so much that Chambers was appointed Surveyor General of Texas in 1829. Accompanied by Land Commissioner, Juan Antonio Padilla, Chambers set sail for Texas in February 1830 on a mission to certify claims and issue titles to those who had been in Texas prior to 1827. His position as an agent for the Mexican Government at a time when Mexico began restricting trade, limiting further immigration from America, levying new taxes, and implementing a new civil administration immediately put him on the wrong foot with many of the settlers around the Galveston Bay. It didn’t help that he purchased title to 11 leagues of land around the bay, including land around the newly established Fort Anahuac and townsite from Padilla’s brother in 1830-- land which already had settlers on it.
Impressions of a would-be Empresario: Thomas Jefferson Chambers
David Burnet, the first, interim president of the Republic of Texas, harbored a long-standing personal grudge against Chambers, believing him to be self-serving, insincere and cowardly. Chambers’ mission to survey and inspect land grants more than once undermined Burnet’s plans to settle colonists around the Galveston Bay. Burnet wasn’t the only one to give Chambers the cold shoulder in the years leading up to the Texas Revolution. During the Anahuac Disturbances of 1832, American colonists hanged Chambers in effigy for his ties to the Mexican authorities. Stephen F. Austin, for his part, was initially impressed when he met Chambers in 1830 and said so in letters to friends. Austin believed that his mastery of Spanish and his high placed connections in Mexico would be an asset to the Texas colonization scheme. He even hired Chambers as a paid land agent for the colonists of East Texas after Mexico suspended issuing new land titles under the Law of April 6, 1830. By 1834, however, Austin had completely reversed his opinion. Writing from prison in Mexico City in Autumn 1834, Austin was convinced that Chambers had conspired in his arrest and continued detention. He described Chambers’ political peacocking in letters to James Perry:
The idea which my friends all had, that he was my personal enemy had no weight with me so long as I believed he could be of public utility. But if he has spent the last winter to intrigue at Monclova for the purpose of keeping me in prison, and of wheedling this simple Govt out of sixty leagues of land for two years services as judge, and entangling all the upper country so that no man of common sence [sic] will settle there—if he has been doing all this, he certainly is not the man I believed him to be, and so far from serving Texas, he is calculated to do nothing but harm. I never condemn any one hastily or without evidence—that he has much boyish ambition and vanity I always knew….” (S.F. Austin to James Perry Nov. 6, 1834).
Indeed, Chambers seems to have played both sides of the Texas Revolution right up to the end, first stirring up public sentiment for an independent Texas, then seeking peaceful solutions to the unfolding conflict, all seemingly in service of his own self-promotion. When he finally committed himself to the Texas Revolution, it was January of 1836, when he convinced the Texas General Council to let him head back to the United States on a promise to enlist and equip some 1900 volunteers for the Texas Revolution using his own money and credit. In return he asked to be named Major General in the Texian Army. He did manage to send several hundred volunteers to Texas before the war ended on March 2, 1836, but not nearly the number he claimed. He wouldn’t return to Texas until June of 1837.
Glorious and Inglorious Promise
As 1836 came to a close, wrapped the afterglow of the revolution, Chambers envisioned a shining future for himself and country. He opened a diary in December with uncanny awareness of the watershed moment, writing:
What an eventful period it has been for myself and country. What changes have happened: what dangers escaped. Surely superhuman influence has directed and controlled the whole….it behooves me to reflect seriously upon the future…my present situation and the duties before, all admonish me of the necessity of vigilance and discretion: promptness and activity and great energy in execution; and the circumstances by which I am surrounded promise a glorious result (Diary of Thomas Jefferson Chambers, December 31, 1836).
These thoughts, penned in the first months of Texas’ independence, seem to have guided his deeds for years to come. Upon returning to Texas, Chambers busied himself with the business of building political, economic, and social institutions for the new nation. He founded a philosophical society; he ran unsuccessfully for Texas Senate. He would unsuccessfully run for state office at least twice more in his lifetime. Chambers styled himself as an empresario and attempted to form a new colony that he called Chambersia near the former Mexican administrative headquarters at Anahuac. He sold script for the new town to Andrew Briscoe but enticed few others. Most of the folks living around the bay were still wary of Chambers and his grasping schemes. By 1839, Chambers was living in Chambersia; but sources conflict on whether his home at the time was near the present-day Chambers House, or a few miles south near Round Point.
In 1840 he left Texas once again to drum up immigrants from the United States to his little town of Chambersia. When he returned in 1843, having failed to attract any new settlers, he found a man named John O’Brian had purchased at a Liberty County Sheriff’s auction his entire Upper Galveston Bay estate for $3,000 of unpaid debts to said O’Brian. Chambers immediately filed a lawsuit but lost in county court. Enraged, Chambers took matters into his own hands reportedly claiming, “If I cannot hold the land I claim by law, I will hold it by my rifle.” He shot and killed O’Brian in cold blood on the front porch of his house. Chambers then turned himself in. He must have appealed to his powerful connections in the Republic to dismiss the murder case because he was never indicted on any charges. However, in retaliation, O’Brian’s widow filed a claim for the Round Point house against Chambers, a claim which she’d won by 1850. Dogged if nothing else in his pursuit of property, Chambers soon after filed an appeal, essentially burying the case in paperwork. He might have won it too, if not for the fact that after five years of Chambers’ legal stonewalling, the court discovered that he had “borrowed” (for a period of more than four years) the transcript documents for this case and others he was pursuing in the Texas Supreme Court and was holding them at his home in Anahuac. Commenting on Chambers’ unprecedented theft of court documents, the court summarily dismissed Chambers' appeal in 1855. Finally, in October of 1856 Chambers settled the case against him when he gave O’Brian’s son a deed for 500 acres of land on the Brazos River. (Daybook of Thomas Jefferson Chambers, October 31, 1856).
This case, however, and the discovery of his theft of court documents shed new light on another case Chambers was involved in—a separate long-standing legal dispute with Charles Willcox over title to what would become the townsite of Anahuac and Chambers’ new home at Chambersia. The lawsuit had been going since 1838. Like Chambers, Willcox had lived along the Galveston Bay since 1830. He operated a general store with Nicholas Labadie in the town of Anahuac even when it was a Mexican Garrison. Willcox patented 2/3 of league around his home in March 1835 and he believed Chambers’ prior claim to be invalid on a technicality.
Although records are silent as to the nature of feelings between the two men, circumstances suggest they were regular antagonists. Willcox was among the early settlers in Anahuac that were staunchly on the side of rebellion during the Anahuac disturbances of 1832 and 1835. Chambers for his part, publicly sought a diplomatic solution to those skirmishes and waffled throughout the Texas Revolution. Willcox was closely connected to the four Hardin brothers of Liberty, Texas, who practically ran the Liberty County seat.[1] Benjamin Watson Hardin would become Liberty County Sheriff from 1839-1845, and it was he who tried to sell Chambers’ land to John O’Brian at auction in 1843. It is not hard to imagine that the scheme to sell Chambersia for unpaid debts while Chambers was absent from Texas was engineered by Willcox himself, with aid from his own powerful friends in nearby Liberty.
The legal case between Chambers and Willcox over land went back and forth through various appeals until finally reaching the Texas Supreme Court. As with the O’Brian case, Chambers audaciously removed and kept the court’s transcript documents in his home for nearly four years during the 1850s. In 1862, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Willcox. Chambers, however, refused to leave his home, having leased his boat dock, and a portion his land to the Confederacy for a Civil War fort, fittingly known as Fort Chambers.
By this time, he was married to Abbey Chubb of Galveston, who was nearly 30 years his junior, and the couple had a young daughter, Kate. The Chambers family was comfortably settled at a new stately home overlooking Turtle Bay. The house Chambers built was a two-story wood framed dog-run style home, a common vernacular building plan for the period. It did have several distinctive features, however. An elegant circular staircase ran from the first story to the second along the front porch, and a large stained-glass window with a five-pointed star decorated the east-facing gable. Chambers reportedly had it shipped from the north. The star represented his devotion to Texas.
Portraits of Abbey Chubb Chambers and the Chambers House as it appeared in the 1880s.
As much as he pledged devotion to Texas through words and gestures, Texas it would seem, was not nearly as devoted to Chambers. Maintaining his social standing, wealth, and landholdings required his constant vigilance and ingenuity. Although Chambers reportedly held title to hundreds of thousands of acres spread throughout Texas, a large number of those were tied up in litigation both during his lifetime and after, so much so that when he died, his estate was largely worthless. Legal challenges to landholding weren’t the only threat. His enemies were constantly throwing fresh obstacles along his road to empire.
In 1850 he petitioned the State Legislature to protest the incorporation of a new railway called the “Anahuack Canaling and Railroad Company” which had plans to build its route through Chambersia. In his petition he wrote that the object of the bill, put forward by a consortium of Galveston-based individuals well known to Chambers, was to “embarrass and impede the accomplishments and improvements calculated to promote the growth and prosperity of a little town at the place and owned by your petitioner.” He boldly accused the men behind the railway of furtively attempting to appropriate his little town (which was not named but which was presumably Chambersia) as part of a “ruthless war” against him. I haven’t figured out yet who was behind the Anahuack Canaling and Railroad Company, but the possibilities are assorted.[2]
In 1854 Chambers countered this “ruthless war” with a transportation plan of his own. He incorporated the Chambers Transportation Company to build a railway from the Brazos River to Chambersia and then back up to the Red River. Two years later he presented the legislature with an even bolder plan to incorporate the Terraqueous Transportation Company, a hybrid rail and sail system, capable of carrying freight and passengers by both land and sea. Chambers claimed to have invented and patented it himself. For this the legislature granted him the right to construct 4000 miles of road over a period of 100 years. He then petitioned for a loan to build the first 50 miles, promising a double return on the investment. The company never built a single mile of track.
A Family Man
Chambers was undoubtedly a man driven by ambition and vanity. But that does not capture his character in its entirety. Chambers was also a man with a deep loyalty to family who was known for his hospitality and generosity. Personal letters from Chambers and others in his family show he promoted the careers of his nephews in Texas, Phillip C. Sisson, Thomas Jefferson “Jeff” Chambers and William Chambers, giving them money and support in times of need. William Chambers repaid his uncle by writing a glowing biography in preparation for Gen. Chambers 1854 run for Governor. Despite distance from his brothers and sisters who remained in Kentucky and Virginia, Chambers remained close to them, particularly his sister Rachel Sisson, and visited or wrote to them with some regularity. He loved his young wife and daughters, and they seemed to genuinely care for him too. His wife Abbey wrote fondly in one letter to her sister-in-law Rachel (who was more like a mother to her in age as well as bearing):
General Chambers arrived home on the 30th of May (in good health) after quite a fatiguing journey through the interior of the county, he expects to remain home the remainder of the summer, which of course delights me, as I so seldom have an opportunity of enjoying his society. (Letter from Abby Chambers to Rachel Sisson from Chambersia June 27, 1857)
Returning from that trip, Chambers surprised his wife with a beautiful dappled gray riding horse that Abbey described as one of the “finest pacers you can imagine.” His tender feelings also extended to his children. He brought his four year-old daughter, Kate, a leather side saddle for the pony he had already bought for her. Chambers was very keen to teach her to ride. It is said that when he was shot at his home in 1865, he was upstairs playing with his infant daughter Stella.
One thing is certain: Chambers was a polarizing figure not just during his lifetime, but well after it. His legal entanglements continued into the 20th century with a famous case over ownership of land around the State Capitol in Austin; land Chambers claimed was his as early as 1836. The case was finally settled in 1925 (the longest running lawsuit in Texas History) with $20,000 being awarded to his descendants, primarily out of pity and goodwill. For all Chambers' purported wealth during his lifetime, he left very little of value to his wife and children upon his death. Yet his life emblemizes the social and political high drama that played out repeatedly during the Texas Republic and early statehood periods. This blog barely scratches the surface on his life’s portrait. An entire book exploring the deeds, motivations, and character of a man whose legacy in Texas was so substantial could and should be written. But that’s a project for another time.
[1] Willcox served in the same regiment as two Hardin brothers in 1837
[2] Chambers frequently talked about his many enemies in letters, newspaper announcements, broadsides, and petitions. One of these enemies was Williams Fields of Liberty, with whom Chambers waged an extended public newspaper quarrel. Fields had served in the state legislature and was ironically named State Engineer in 1856.
Sources used: Evans, Katherine (1947) Notes on Chambersia. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Vol. 50, No. 4, pp.487-488.|“Chambers, Thomas Jefferson,” in Handbook of Texas Online, (https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/chambers-thomas-jefferson-1802-1865). | “Willcox, Charles,” in Handbook of Texas Online. (https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/willcox-charles). | Scherer, Robert B. Jr. (2018) Family on the Bay: Walter and Annie Scherer, their Children and Descendants. Books Mind, Texas. | Diary of Thomas Jefferson Chambers Dec. 1836-1837 (housed at the Herzstein Library, San Jacinto Monument, Texas). | Digital Austin Papers (http://digitalaustinpapers.org/document?id=APB4694). | Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Texas Supreme Court Vol. 14 (Chambers v O’brian, https://www.google.com/books). | T.J. Chambers, in “Memorials and Petitions in the U.S. 1834-1929” (Ancestry.com). | Daybook of Thomas Jefferson Chambers 1856 (housed at the Herzstein Library, San Jacinto Monument, Texas). | Friend, Llerena Beaufort (1928) “The Life of Thomas Jefferson Chambers” Unpublished Master’s Thesis for the University of Texas, Austin (on file at Chambers County Museum). | Chambers, William M (1853) A Sketch of the Life of Gen. T.J. Chambers. Printed at the Book and Job Office of the Galveston News, Galveston.
Comments