"...some disagreement; Garner finally declared solemnly that he would "concede" to Gore, and instead run for a position in the State House on the provision that he would earn the support of Rayburn to be the body's Speaker. As such, Gore faced only token opposition when Texas' electoral college gathered in Austin on September 12th, 1916, to elect the Republic's first permanent President.
The constitution of the Second Republic of Texas was still rudimentary; some features would soon be done away with, like the electoral college, while other features, like runoffs for Presidential and Congressional elections, were still a ways away, but the overall features of the political system that would last uninterrupted for the next fifty-four years can be seen. Much of the model of governance of the original Republic of Texas was returned in the new Constitution. There would be a hundred and fifty members of the Texas House of Representatives and, as a result, fifty Senators; the House would be elected annually to one-year terms, while Senators would serve rolling ten-year terms, and neither house was exposed to term limits. [1] This was not the case for the President, who was elected to a single, three-year term that was not immediately non-renewable, but in his victory address to the gathered electoral college, Gore promised that come 1922, when he again came eligible, "you shall not see my name put forth for reconsideration," and he explicitly hoped that he would set a "Washington precedent" in Presidents of Texas declining to return to office when the time came.
Plainly, this constitutional structure made the Presidency an extraordinarily weak office; one major additional difference to the prior Republic, too, was that there was no constitutional Vice Presidency, with the President of the Senate instead enjoying the first place in the line of succession and arguably being the most powerful figure, constitutionally. [2] This was in part why Garner was attracted to the office of Speaker of the House, and why Morris Shepherd gladly assumed the Presidency of the Texas Senate; for all the trappings Gore had in his office, he would be gone in three years, whereas they could govern Texas for at least another decade together if they so desired. This had the desired effect of, in the wake of the controversies of the Ferguson years, making Texas almost a pseudo-parliamentary system despite the trappings of Presidentialism from its Amero-Confederate heritage, and this did not go unnoticed amongst the other leaders of the Republican Party [3]; Rayburn eagerly slid into the role of Majority Leader for his longtime friend and mentor, while Johnson found himself limited in his ambitions as the executive Secretary of Public Education by ambitious legislators.
The election occurred nearly three months before inauguration on December 1st, 1916, by which time the war had almost entirely ended spare scattered skirmishes. Confederate positions around Galveston and Houston collapsed in late October and the evacuation across the Sabine included Ferguson himself, who would find himself in exile in Baton Rouge trying to organize a "Loyalist Texan" government there with the intent to attack the Republic and retake it, a problem that would fester for years to come even as his popularity wavered with Loyalists who blamed him for the debacle; by November 11th, the day that the Confederacy surrendered to the United States, Republican troops had secured the crossings of the Sabine and American forces had invested Shreveport for the first and only major land engagement in Louisiana. It was thus a fait accompli that by the time Gore took his oath of office on the first of December - almost a year to the day since the travesty at the Capitol that had triggered the revolution - he was doing it in a de facto free Texas, save for American occupiers across much of the north and west.
"The tree of liberty grows strongest here on the great Texan plain," he opened his address with, reciting it from memory due to his blindness. "And for the first time in seventy years, it grows under the flag of a free republic!"..."
- Republic Reborn
[1] This, along with the Presidential three-year term, is indeed how the Republic of Texas operated, and its so perfectly insane that I have to keep it
[2] Inspired by Texas' modern arrangement in which the Lieutenant Governor is absolutely the most powerful political figure in the state
[3] Irony of Garner, Rayburn, et al being "Republicans" not unintentional
