Richard Coke
| Richard Coke | |
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United States Senator from Texas |
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In office March 4, 1877 – March 4, 1895 |
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| Preceded by | Morgan C. Hamilton |
| Succeeded by | Horace Chilton |
| 15th Governor of Texas | |
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In office January 15, 1874 – December 21, 1876 |
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| Lieutenant | Vacant |
| Preceded by | Edmund J. Davis |
| Succeeded by | Richard B. Hubbard |
| Personal details | |
| Born | March 18, 1829 |
| Died | May 14, 1897 (aged 68) |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Alma mater | College of William and Mary |
Richard Coke (March 18, 1829 – May 14, 1897) was an American lawyer, farmer, and statesman from Waco, Texas. He was the 15th governor of Texas from 1874 to 1876 and represented Texas in the U.S. Senate from 1877 to 1895. His uncle was Congressman Richard Coke, Jr..
Richard Coke was born in 1829 in Williamsburg, Virginia, to John and Eliza (Hankins) Coke. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1848 with a law degree.
In 1850, he moved to Texas and opened a law practice in Waco. In 1852, he married Mary Horne of Waco. The couple would have four children, but all of them died before age 30.
Coke was a delegate to the Secession Convention at Austin in 1861. He joined the Confederate Army as a private. In 1862 he raised a company that became part of the 15th Texas Infantry, and served as its Captain for the rest of the war. He was wounded in an action known as Bayou Bourbeau on November 3, 1863, near Opelousas, Louisiana. After the war, he returned home to Waco.
In 1865, Coke was appointed a Texas District Court judge, and in 1866 he was elected as an associate justice to the Texas Supreme Court. The following year the military governor General Philip Sheridan fired Coke and four other judges as ‘an impediment to reconstruction’, in pursuit of unionist Reconstruction policies. The firing of the five judges became a cause célèbre and made their names famous, synonymous in the public eye with resistance to Union occupation.
No one benefited more from prevailing public sentiment than Richard Coke, who in 1873 leveraged resentment at Union occupation to construct a Democratic electoral coalition that ruled Texas for more than 100 years. This Democratic power was based on disfranchisement of blacks, Mexican Americans and poor whites through the use of poll taxes and white primaries. For example, the number of black voters decreased sharply from more than 100,000 in the 1890s to 5,000 in 1906.
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