Texas Originals

Matthew Gaines

August 4, 1840–June 11, 1900

As one of Texas’s first Black legislators, Matthew Gaines fought to secure constitutional rights and establish a system of public education for free Black Texans during Reconstruction.

Born enslaved in Louisiana in 1840, Gaines was sold into Texas as a young man. During the Civil War, he worked as a blacksmith in Fredericksburg after a failed attempt to escape to Mexico. He moved to Washington County when the war ended, where his civic role as a Baptist preacher led voters to elect him to the state senate in 1869.

As a state senator, Gaines championed issues important to Black Texans in the Reconstruction era. He was an advocate of free, integrated public education and pushed the legislature to accept the federal land grant that made possible the creation of Texas A&M University. He fought against voter intimidation and mob violence during the tumultuous 1870s.

Gaines’s uncompromising advocacy for formerly enslaved Texans made him a targeted figure. Political opponents charged him with crimes, and though his spurious conviction was overturned, Gaines was declared ineligible for office upon his reelection in 1873.

His political career ended, Gaines returned to Washington County and the pulpit. No longer a statewide public figure, he died unheralded in 1900.

In 2021, after a decades-long effort to commemorate his contributions to education in the state, Texas A&M dedicated a Matthew Gaines statue on its campus.

For More about Matthew Gaines

The idea of free public education in the South took a major leap forward once formerly enslaved persons entered Southern state legislatures during Reconstruction. In addition to furthering primary and secondary schools, Black Republicans made it possible for Southern states to take advantage of the Morrill Act of 1862 that would create public land grant universities. Gaines fought hard for such initiatives and is considered instrumental in the creation of Texas A&M University in College Station and the historically Black Prairie View A&M University. The Jim Crow era’s downplaying of Reconstruction’s revolutionary role in American history led these contributions to be devalued until their reappraisal in the civil rights era. Gaines received new appreciation in recent years, leading Texas A&M students to marshal a decades-long attempt to secure a statue commemorating him on campus in College Station. In 2021, those efforts came to fruition as Gaines’s descendants, alongside  university and community leaders, finally dedicated the statue.

Black churches, often clandestine during slavery, became some of the earliest and most prominent Black public institutions and centers of civic life following abolition. It is no wonder that Gaines, one of the first Black political leaders after the Civil War in Texas, was also a minister and religious leader. Among the congregations with which Gaines was associated was Bethel St. Paul United Baptist Church in Giddings, an institution still active today and one that commemorates its ties to this Reconstruction leader with a state historical marker.

Although ousted from his seat in the senate, Gaines remained active in politics until the end of his life. UNT’s Portal to Texas History includes scans from 1884 Brenham and La Grange newspapers containing a political letter written by Gaines and addressed to “the Republicans of the Twelfth Senatorial District.”

Selected Bibliography

Campbell, Randolph. Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865–1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Crouch, Barry A. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Texans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

Malone, Ann Patton. "Matt Gaines: Reconstruction Politician." In Black Leaders: Texans for Their Times, edited by Alwyn Barr and Robert A. Calvert, 49–75. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1981.

Moneyhon, Carl H. George T. Ruby: Champion of Civil Rights in Reconstruction Texas. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2020.

Moneyhon, Carl H. The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2021.

Pitre, Merline. Through Many Dangers, Toils, and Snares: The Black Leadership of Texas, 1868–1900. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016.

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Portrait of Matthew Gaines. Courtesy of the Lawrence T. Jones III Texas Photographs Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

Statue of Matthew Gaines in the Yolanda and Jimmy '65 Janacek Plaza at Texas A&M University. Image by Laura McKenzie/Texas A&M Division of Marketing & Communications.