Elisha Marshall Pease (January 3, 1812 – August 26, 1883) was a Texas politician. He served as the fifth and 13th governor of Texas.

Texas Republic

A native of

Enfield Enfield may refer to: Places Australia * Enfield, New South Wales * Enfield, South Australia ** Electoral district of Enfield, a state electoral district in South Australia, corresponding to the suburb ** Enfield High School (South Australia) ...

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its capita ...

, Pease moved to

Mexican Texas Mexican Texas is the historiographical name used to refer to the era of Texan history between 1821 and 1836, when it was part of Mexico. Mexico gained independence in 1821 after winning its war against Spain, which began in 1810. Initially ...

in 1835. He soon became active in the Texas independence movement and after the Texas Revolution began, Pease became the secretary of the provisional government. He served as the assistant secretary at the Convention of 1836 but was not an elected delegate to the Convention. After independence had been won, Pease was named the comptroller of public accounts in the government of the new but temporary Republic of Texas.

Texas State

Following the annexation of Texas to the United States, Pease was elected to the

Texas House of Representatives The Texas House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Texas Legislature. It consists of 150 members who are elected from single-member districts for two-year terms. As of the 2010 United States census, each member represents abo ...

in 1845 and reelected in 1847. In 1849, he ran for the

Texas Senate The Texas Senate ( es, Senado de Texas) is the upper house of the Texas State Legislature. There are 31 members of the Senate, representing single-member districts across the U.S. state of Texas, with populations of approximately 806,000 per co ...

from

District 11 District 11 can refer to: *District 11 (Ho Chi Minh city), Vietnam *District 11 (Zürich), Switzerland * District 11, an electoral district of Malta * Colorado Springs School District 11, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States *District 11 ( ...

( Brazoria and

Galveston Galveston ( ) is a coastal resort city and port off the Southeast Texas coast on Galveston Island and Pelican Island in the U.S. state of Texas. The community of , with a population of 47,743 in 2010, is the county seat of surrounding Ga ...

counties) but lost to John B. Jones who was sworn in on November 5, 1849. Pease contested the election, was declared the winner, and was sworn in four days later on November 9, 1849. Pease first ran for governor in 1851 but withdrew from the race two weeks before the

election An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has opera ...

. He was elected in each of the next two elections,

1853 Events January–March * January 6 – Florida Governor Thomas Brown signs legislation that provides public support for the new East Florida Seminary, leading to the establishment of the University of Florida. * January 8 – Taiping R ...

and

1855 Events January–March * January 1 – Ottawa, Ontario, is incorporated as a city. * January 5 – Ramón Castilla begins his third term as President of Peru. * January 23 ** The first bridge over the Mississippi River open ...

. As governor, he paid off the state debt and established the financial foundation that the state would later use to finance its schools and colleges. In 1856, surveyor Jacob de Córdova of the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad Company named a newly discovered river in

West Texas West Texas is a loosely defined region in the U.S. state of Texas, generally encompassing the arid and semiarid lands west of a line drawn between the cities of Wichita Falls, Abilene, and Del Rio. No consensus exists on the boundary betwee ...

the " Pease River" after the governor.. Retrieved October 30, 2006.

Civil War and aftermath

During the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states ...

, Pease sided with the Union. He nonetheless enslaved several people; census records show ten enslaved people living and laboring at Pease's Austin plantation in 1860. After the war, he became a leader in the state Republican Party and was appointed as the civilian governor of Texas in 1867 by General Philip H. Sheridan, who was the military head of the

Reconstruction Reconstruction may refer to: Politics, history, and sociology *Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company *'' Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Unio ...

government. Pease's policies as governor alienated both ex-Unionists and ex-Confederates and he resigned in 1869. Elisha and his wife donated land to the City of Austin that would eventually become

Pease Park Pease Park (officially Pease District Park) is an urban park in central Austin, Texas. Paralleling Shoal Creek west of downtown, the park is frequented by University of Texas at Austin and Long-View Micro School students and, formerly, by disc g ...

. Pease died of

apoplexy Apoplexy () is rupture of an internal organ and the accompanying symptoms. The term formerly referred to what is now called a stroke. Nowadays, health care professionals do not use the term, but instead specify the anatomic location of the bleedi ...

Lampasas Lampasas ( ) is a city in Lampasas County, Texas, United States. Its population was 7,291 at the 2020 census. It is the seat of Lampasas County. Lampasas is part of the Killeen–Temple–Fort Hood metropolitan statistical area. History ...

, Texas. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin, Texas.

Notes

References

* * Griffin, Roger, "He was made of turkey." (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1973).

External links

Entry for Elisha M. Pease
from th
''Biographical Encyclopedia of Texas''
published 1880, hosted by th
Portal to Texas History.
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Pease, Elisha M. 1812 births 1883 deaths People from Enfield, Connecticut Texas Unionists People of the Texas Revolution Republican Party governors of Texas Republican Party Texas state senators People from Austin, Texas People of Texas in the American Civil War Burials at Oakwood Cemetery (Austin, Texas) Unionist Party state governors of the United States 19th-century American politicians