- George F. Moore (Chief Justice, August 1866 -- September 1867, Associate Justice 1862-'66)
- Richard Coke (August 1866 -- September 1867)
- S. P. Donley (October 1866 -- September 1867)
- Asa H. Willie (August 1866 -- September 1867)
- George W. Smith (August 1866 -- September 1867)
What happened next, though, must have been one of the most exciting moments ever in Texas politics, and certainly in the annals of Texas habeas law:
Disregarding the court ruling, the Democrats secured the keys to the second floor of the Capitol and took possession. Davis was reported to have state troops stationed on the lower floor. The Travis Rifles (see TRAVIS GUARDS AND RIFLES), summoned to protect [incumbent Gov. Edmund] Davis, were converted into a sheriff's posse and protected Coke. On January 15, 1874, Coke was inaugurated as governor. On January 16, Davis arranged for a truce, but he made one final appeal for federal intervention. A telegram from President Ulysses S. Grant said that he did not feel warranted in sending federal troops to keep Davis in office. Davis resigned his office on January 19. Coke's inauguration restored Democratic control in Texas.Imagine if, upon receipt of the Supreme Court order in Bush v. Gore, Vice President Gore had holed himself up in the White House with an armed contingent and assumed the Presidency anyway, with the military and law enforcement reluctantly acquiescing to his rule over the court's objections: That would be a rough, modern equivalent of Coke's bold ascension to Governor after his ouster from the Texas Supreme Court.
Coke's story ranks as one of the most extraordinary in Texas political history. And arguably among the darkest. "In 1859 Coke was appointed by Gov. Hardin R. Runnels to a commission that decided that Comanche Indians on the Brazos Indian Reservation should be removed from Texas." He had been a delegate to Texas' secession commission, voting "yes," and volunteered as a private when the Civil War commenced, returning from the field with battle injuries as a captain with the Fifteenth Texas Infantry. He was elected to the state Supreme Court in 1866, then went in just a few years from writing opinions on behalf of the court to openly defying an order by the judges who succeeded him as he seized control of the governor's office at gunpoint. Once there, said this source (p. 156), "the court which immediately followed the Semicolon Court ... was appointed by Gov. Coke and served until the adoption of the 1876 Constitution."
Step back from the details for a moment to consider the arch of this man's political career. Richard Coke went from being ousted from his Texas Supreme Court post by the US military governor to earning the Texas Governor's seat in an election culminating in an armed showdown, after which, victorious, he named all the replacement judges. Can't you imagine those appointments must have been a particularly satisfying political prize? He oversaw the writing of the state constitution that formally launched Jim Crow in Texas, then went to Washington as US Senator to fight federal intervention from what he must have considered the belly of the beast. Even if his tenure in the US Senate failed to match the drama of his state-level political skirmishes, what an epic career!
So it was that Justice Coke become Governor Coke, and later US Senator Coke. But really, none of the Supreme Court judges ousted by the military left the political scene, and indeed in many ways the group became the core of Texas' post-reconstruction government. Justice George F. Moore, for example, re-emerged as the first Chief Justice on the Texas Supreme Court elected under Texas' 1876 Constitution, which first established the architecture of Jim Crow. Justice Asa Willie, who was a Texas Attorney General before the Civil War and fought at Chickimauga before being elected to, then ousted from, the Texas Supreme Court, later succeeded Moore as Chief Justice before he was elected to the US Congress. A county in the Panhandle is named after Justice Donley (another in west Texas is named for Coke), while George Smith went on to serve in the Texas Legislature before his premature death from yellow fever in 1873. Most pivotal among them, though, was Justice Coke.
In the Coke-Davis episode, a habeas ruling was defied at gunpoint in an embittered political dispute. Meanwhile, a posthumous remembrance (p. vii) of Chief Justice George F. Moore in 1884 by fellow Texas Supreme Court Justice A.W. Terrell described another remarkable habeas writ, this one issued during war time, which successfully dissuaded a Confederate military commander from punishment of Union sympathizers. The ruling supposedly was the source of the allegation that Moore and his fellow ex-Confederate justices would not subjugate themselves to military rule. Wrote Terrell:
I would do injustice to him as a judge and be recreant to duty as a friend, now that he is gone, if I failed in this solemn moment to rescue his memory from the aspersion conveyed in the language of a military order that once removed him from his high place. At no time during the war between the states was the maxim inter arma leges silent so forcibly illustrated as in 1864. During that year four citizens of Texas, disloyal to her government, however exempt from service, were confined in a military camp on charges of treason and conspiracy against the Confederate States. The general commanding had determined to make by their sacrifice a terrible example - unless rescued by the civil law their doom was sealed. For them, Chief Justice Moore issued writs of habeas corpus, which were disregarded by order of the commanding general on the grounds that the Confederate congress had passed an act suspending the writ. Judge Moore, unawed by power, then rose to the full dignity of a fearless judge and delivered the opinion in which it will be found these memorable words: "If the refusal to obey the writ was by order of the commanding general, then he is the principal offender. Those by whom he has perpetrated so glaring an outrage upon the law and authority of this court are alike his subordinates in criminality and inferiors in rank. ... Better it would be for the prisoners who are in custody, though doubly guilty, beyond all that is charged against them, to go unwhipped of justice, than for the civil authorities to be subordinated to military control and made dependent on the consent of the latter for the discharge of its functions." The commanding general bowed his head, purged himself of the contempt, and the doomed men, rescued by the hand of the law from a drum-head court martial, were restored to their families. Such was the action of a Texas judge when the tinkle of a secretary's bell condemned unheard the citizens of other states to military bastilles. How can posterity believe that when the clash of arms had ceased and sweet peace came again to bless the land, a judge so loyal to the high trust reposed in him by the people, was removed from the bench by a military satrap as an "impediment to reconstruction" of civil government? Of his associate impediments, one now represents this state in the United States senate, and another presides as chief justice of this court.That's a powerful example of the use of the habeas writ during wartime - probably one without parallel under Lincoln's Union during the same period.
As the bittersweet irony of history would have it, when Moore took the reins of the Texas Supreme Court as Chief Justice again in 1878, the Texas Constitution had split off the habeas corpus function and given it to a new "Court of Appeal," which was the predecessor of the modern-day Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. As Chief Justice of the new Texas Supreme Court, he no longer had jurisdiction over the writ which had made him a living legend among his peers.
My grandfather worked as a cowboy on the XIT Ranch, which was famously traded to a group of Chicago investors to finance construction of the Texas state capitol. Our family lore surrounding the capitol's construction, however, didn't generally include prisoners significant role: Says the Texas State Historical Association, "Between 1885 and 1887 about 500 prisoners quarried granite and limestone for construction of the new Capitol in Austin; prisoners at the Rusk Penitentiary manufactured the building's interior cast-iron features." Grits should have known that, I suppose, but I was unaware. What's more, the use of prisoners in these capacities was the source of a major labor dispute dubbed the Capitol Boycott, and reading a description of that protracted quarrel, it's a wonder the capitol was ever built at all! 
For more information, check Cindi Harwood Rose's website and blog at 