"Big Drunk" Gets Baptized

by Tom Goodman

“The Baptism of Sam Houston” hangs in Independence Baptist Church in Independence, Texas

You’re never too ruined to be beyond change, and you’re never too admired to not need it. 

Sam Houston is a case in point.

At 61, the Texas hero became a believer and submitted to baptism in Ricky Creek near his home in Independence, Texas.  

One old companion of his wilder days winked at his dripping-wet friend and asked if he felt his sins had now been washed away.  

"Yes," said Houston, adding, "and God help the fish down below!"

Sam Houston in traditional Cherokee dress

If it wasn’t for the historical record, you would think Sam Houston was a made-up character in a Texas tall tale. 

He was born in 1793 to Scottish-Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania, the fifth of nine children. When his father died, the family moved south to Maryville, Tennessee, near today’s Smoky Mountains. At sixteen, Houston walked away from a clerk’s job in his brother’s store and disappeared into the wilderness. There, he was taken in by a Cherokee chief known to Americans as John Jolly, who gave him the name Colonneh—“the Raven.” Houston became fluent in Cherokee and lived between two worlds for years.

At nineteen, he returned home, founded one of Tennessee’s earliest schools, and soon after was swept into the War of 1812. He fought bravely and survived multiple wounds. Those scars opened doors. He befriended Andrew Jackson, studied law, entered politics, and rose quickly—congressman, then governor of Tennessee before thirty-five.

A brief, disastrous marriage ended his governorship in scandal. Later, while lobbying in Washington for Native American rights (where he preferred his Cherokee garb to business suits), Houston was publicly slandered by a congressman. He responded by publicly beating the man with a hickory cane. At trial, Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” served as his attorney. Despite the competent defense, Houston was convicted and fined.

Rather than pay, he fled west into Mexican Texas. 

Matthew Brady's photograph of Sam Houston

He soon found himself at the center of revolution. On his forty-third birthday, Houston signed the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico and led Texian forces to victory. Texas made him president of the new Republic, and when the Republic became the twenty-eighth state in the Union, Houston became its governor—making him the only man ever to be elected as governor of two different states. The state’s largest city still bears his name.

He stood six foot six. Weathered. Hard. Not exactly pious. Friends and enemies alike had called him “Big Drunk” from the days of his youth. 

But his wife, a devout Baptist, prayed for him faithfully. Houston himself later wrote that, at first, he attended church only out of respect for her faith. Somewhere along the way, though, it took. And at 61, he sought baptism as the profession of his faith in Christ. Word spread quickly: Texans came from far and wide to see the baptism of their hero. Rufus Burleson, the church’s pastor and the president of the fledgling Baylor University, conducted the ceremony.

He was re-elected governor in 1859 but soon clashed with Texas’s secession movement. Ever the Unionist, he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and was removed from office in 1861. He died in 1863. Among the statements on his tombstone summarizing his life, he wanted the words “Consistent Christian.” 

67-foot statue of Sam Houston along Interstate 45 in Huntsville

Credit: Tiffany Hofeldt for Texas Highways

Sam Houston mastered reinvention long before it became fashionable. He crossed borders, rebuilt reputations, and outlived disgrace more than once. Yet Houston understood that a man may conquer nations and still need mercy. The most radical act of his life might be when he stepped into the water and admitted it.

Inside the Pardon Palace

  by Tom Goodman

Kathy Bates as Ma Ferguson in The Highwaymen

Why let your loved one languish in a Texas prison when you could seek a pardon from the governor?

For a price.

That was the accusation leveled at Miriam “Ma” Ferguson. You may remember her from The Highwaymen. Kathy Bates portrayed the woman who became Texas’s first female governor in 1924—less than a decade after women gained the right to vote.

No Texas governor before or since has come close to her record on pardons granted. But it was a record shadowed by persistent rumors that Ma and her husband, James “Pa” Ferguson, operated a mercenary “Pardon Palace.”

Ma ran for governor after Pa was impeached and banned from office. Once elected, she made headlines—and enemies—through her expansive use of executive clemency. By the end of her first year, she had granted more than 1,200 pardons and commutations. The figure is striking when set against a Texas prison population of roughly 3,700 inmates at the time. 

Many more would follow.

Ferguson insisted this flood of mercy sprang from compassion and a belief in second chances. She and Pa condemned the brutality of Texas prisons and styled themselves reformers. Ma described her pardons as acts of Christian charity and later called her mercy toward “poor and unfortunate convicts” her proudest achievement.

That posture earned her loyal support, especially in rural communities where she was seen as a maternal figure. But resentment grew whenever a pardoned inmate reoffended.

One notorious example was Marvin “Buck” Barrow, brother of Clyde. Within weeks of his release, Buck reunited with Clyde and Bonnie Parker, returning to violent crime before dying in a bloody shootout that summer.

Another case proved even more damaging. In 1927, two men pardoned by Ferguson—Marshall Ratliff and Henry Helms—joined the gang responsible for the Santa Claus Bank Robbery in Cisco. Both had served only two years of long sentences for armed robbery. The daytime heist left two officers dead. Prosecutors argued that without Ferguson’s pardons, the killings would not have occurred. Juries gave both men death sentences. (To learn more about this infamous event, get a copy of my book, The Last Man: A Novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery.)

In hindsight, Ferguson’s legacy cuts both ways. Her willingness to extend mercy, especially to nonviolent offenders, looks progressive for her era. Yet rumors of pay-for-pardons never faded. One popular Austin story had Pa offering to sell a desperate father a shabby horse—hinting that if purchased, the man’s son “might ride home on it from Huntsville.”

Ma denied the accusations, but later investigations and memoirs proved the rumors true.

By the end of her second term in 1935, she had pardoned nearly 4,000 inmates. The following year, Texans amended the constitution to create an independent pardons board.

Her pardon record is an outlier that has never been matched by any other Texas governor before or since. In fact, historians often cite her as one of the most mercy-giving (or, to critics, most abusive) chief executives in American history.

For more on the Fergusons, check out Carol O'Keefe Wilson’s excellent book, In the Governor's Shadow: The True Story of Ma and Pa Ferguson.