In his last years Houston compromised his future image as a Texan hero. But then he had never been a "Texas" hero, anymore than Jackson was a "Southern" President. He was an American patriot, soldier, and statesman, first and last. In the Jacksonian age, he was better understood. He died at Huntsville in July 1863, at the age of seventy-one, a generation past his time.
Three months after he was buried, the Confederate legislature of the State of Texas passed a resolution that stands, like the state itself, as his epitaph: "His public services though a long and eventful life, his unblemished patriotism, his great private and moral worth, and his untiring, devoted, and zealous regard for the interests of the state of Texas command our highest admiration, and should be held in perpetual remembrance by the people of this state."
The historian Webb said it better, when he wrote: "Whether we like him or not . . . the fact remains that Sam Houston was no ordinary man."
Chapter 19
THE BONNY BLUE FLAG
Texas has furnished to the Confederate military service thirty-three regiments, thirteen battalions, two squadrons, six detached companies, and one legion of twelve companies of cavalry . . . making 62,000 men, which with the state troops in actual service, 6,500 men, form an aggregate of 68,500 Texans in military service . . . an excess of 4,773 more than her highest popular vote, which was 63,727. From the best information within reach . . . of the men now remaining in the state between the ages of sixteen and sixty years . . . the number will not exceed 27,000.
GOVERNOR FRANCIS R. LUBBOCK, FEBRUARY 5, 1863
ON April 12, 1861, Confederates in South Carolina fired upon the United States garrison at Fort Sumter. Blood was shed, and three days later President Lincoln called for volunteers to preserve the Union. This precipitated war. Each state and each individual American now had to choose sides, and only a few were able successfully to remain neutral.
In Texas, a vast surge of popular patriotism replaced the "Great Fear" of the year before. With the issue defined, almost all prominent men loyally supported the state. J. W. Throckmorton was commissioned a Confederate brigadier. The people who still remained Unionist, or neutral, the more common reaction among the dissidents, were noticeably of Northern or foreign birth. Pockets of Northern immigrants in north Texas resisted allegiance to the Confederacy, and the Germans spread through the hill country above the Balcones Scarp did not rally to the Stars and Bars. Yet this reaction was hardly universal. A large number of merchants and planters born in New York, Pennsylvania, and other far-off states were now strong Confederates, choosing their neighbors over broken or forgotten ties. The switching of political allegiances to conform with immediate environments was already an American phenomenon; ideology itself was weaker in America than social pressures. A majority of the German and other European immigrants, though little publicized, supported their new state. Those Europeans who were most integrated and not living in separated communities with their own kind were the staunchest Confederates; in communities like Fredericksburg and San Antonio, social pressure worked in the opposite way, because here a majority tended toward neutrality. Recent immigrants provided a number of distinguished leaders to Texas: Colonel Augustus Buchel, born in Germany; Colonel John C. Border and Generals Walter Lane and Thomas Waul, all from the British Isles, and General Xavier Debray, of Epinal in France. The dissent of the foreign-born, out of loyalty to the Union and opposition to slavery, has always been exaggerated.
Ninety percent of the population eventually stood by the state. The Mexican minority, located almost entirely south of San Antonio, was politically inert. A few prominent families, such as the Benavides of Laredo, came out for the Confederacy. The majority, who took no part in Anglo-American politics, regarded the war as a gringo affair and opted out. Efforts of Union officers to stir up rebellion along the Rio Grande failed. Because of the remoteness of the areas of Mexican population from the rest of the state, Mexicans were largely left to themselves.
Several thousand men who could not or would not support the Confederacy did leave the state. Most of these congregated across the border in Mexico, where U.S. consuls helped some return to the United States, and recruiting officers enlisted others in the U.S. Army. Other men simply hid out or "laid low." Both slackers and those who joined the Union armies were generally thought of as traitors throughout Texas.
On Confederacy Day, March 16, 1861, most Texans believed that the mere declaration of the new nation made it so. They expected the North to fight, but no one thought it would be a serious war. The Confederacy would be sustained. There were, of course, three fatal flaws in this belief: The relative power of the older Southern states vis-à-vis the industrial North—the South contained only one-third the people and 8 percent of the North's productive capacity—was not understood. Foreign alliances, above all with Britain and France, were expected; Texans had played that game before. The last great error was mistaking, as Houston warned, the will and determination of the American North.
In the spring of 1861 the Union was already destroyed, and the loyal states gave every evidence of indecision and confusion. Abraham Lincoln's superb ability to raise the concept of the Union to the "sublimity of religious mysticism" in the North was not anticipated, nor was the President's determination to prosecute the preservation of the nation ruthlessly, regardless of ultimate cost. The great majority of Southern lawyers believed their own rhetoric.
The first months of 1861 were an unbroken chain of triumphs for the rebellious state. The Convention aggressively applied itself to reducing the Federal power in Texas, and to seizing Federal property. Committees of safety were formed, militia units raised under veteran state officers. The Convention resolved that all U.S. property was "renationalized" upon secession, and thus became the property of the state. The militia, under old Rangers John S. Ford and Ben and Henry McCulloch, marched to enforce the order. State units headed for north Texas, San Antonio, and the Rio Grande, where there were concentrations of Federal troops.
Ten percent of the U.S. Army, 2,700 soldiers under Major General D. E. Twiggs, was stationed in the state. Twiggs himself was a Georgian and not disposed to fight Texans. From his headquarters at San Antonio, he queried Washington for orders. He got none, and this must be credited to his reputation, because in February 1861, no one in Washington knew what to do. Twiggs found himself surrounded by a hostile militia force in San Antonio, demanding his surrender, while none of his superiors would take responsibility for what he was supposed to do.
Twiggs at San Antonio had only 160 men, headquarters troops. The regular army was scattered at small garrisons and Indian-watching forts along a thousand miles of Mexican and Comanche frontier. Feeling his position was impossible, General Twiggs chose to resign his post. But this did not provide him with a solution. The Texans demanded that he make a protocol before he left. He was forced to turn over all Federal property and munitions, while his troops were to be permitted to march to the coast with their personal arms. This compact was extended to include all Federal military units in Texas.
The Federals were not evacuated, however, by the Navy as planned. Before the scattered garrisons could march to the coast, the news of Sumter reached Texas. Considering the state now at war with the United States, the Convention voided the protocol and made the Federal troops prisoners of war. This action was sustained by the Confederate government in Alabama. Without firing a shot, Texans disposed of a large part of the Federal army and seized $3,000,000 in military stores.
Many regulars, particularly officers, were Southerners. A high proportion resigned their commissions and joined the Confederate forces.
Then, in May, 2,000 Texans under Young pushed north over the Red River and captured three Federal forts in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. The remaining Union forces retreated all the way to Kansas. Texas was freed from any immediate invasion danger.
As a border state of the Confederacy, Texas was removed from the centers of action in Virginia and along the Mississippi. The d
esert and Indian-infested areas north and west of settled Texas counties made Union invasion from that direction almost impossible. The greatest peril lay along the Gulf coast, where Texas was exposed to the operations of the superior United States Navy. Another peril, not at first realized, was the hostile Indian frontier, from which the cavalry was now withdrawn. Somewhat ironically, the Texan defense of the seacoast was to be one of the Confederate States' most brilliant feats between 1861 and 1865; but the defense of the interior frontier was to prove a disaster for the state.
In the general euphoria of early 1861, the secessionists believed it would never be necessary to send Texans across the Mississippi to sustain the Southern Confederacy. As in the ominous days of the Revolution, Texas farmers thought mainly about getting their crops planted. Most of the militia disbanded. The new government took only certain defensive measures. Governor Clark and the legislature created 32 militia districts, each commanded by a local brigadier, and a few state troops were dispatched to take over the abandoned Federal forts in the west and on the Rio Grande. The western counties up against the Indian danger were instructed to organize companies of minutemen. Clark further ordered that all arms and ammunition in the hands of private merchants be surrendered to the state, but very little was ever turned in. A canvass of firearms in private hands was also ordered, but this proved something of a fiasco. Only 40,000 weapons, mostly obsolete, were reported. Few Texans were willing to list their firearms, fearing eventual confiscation.
The surveys, however, still revealed a dangerous situation. Despite the windfall provided by General Twiggs, Texas was poorly supplied to fight any kind of sustained war. As a frontier community, Texas depended upon the industrial resources of Europe and the North for firearms. Guns had always been one thing the self-sufficient frontiersmen could not make themselves.
Meanwhile, all partisan political activity ceased. The majority Democratic Party did not bother to make endorsements in the summer elections of 1861. The various contests for state and Confederate posts—Texas was reorganized almost as before, the Federal capital merely being moved to Richmond—devolved into personal popularity contests, and revolved around which candidate would do most to support the war. On this platform Francis R. Lubbock, a sometime lieutenant governor under Hardin Runnels, won the governorship by 124 votes.
Lubbock was energetic, and a deep believer in the South. He traveled up to Richmond while still governor-elect. He arrived in the post-Manassas hour of truth, when both Richmond and Washington were realizing what had been wrought. This was going to be a long, bitter, costly war. Lubbock saw President Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, and asked them what Texas might do to support the war.
Francis Lubbock was one of the few Southern governors who ever asked this question sincerely, and he was one of the few who won Jefferson Davis's undying gratitude and friendship. The parochialism of the South had not ended with secession, as Davis and his government were already discovering.
Lubbock, even more strongly than many men in Richmond, was convinced that the fate of the Confederacy depended upon quick and decisive military action. Lubbock said that the North must be defeated before it could bring superior manpower and resources to bear. His viewpoint was radical to many Texans, who neither saw their state in danger nor accepted the fact that the fate of Texas would be decided eventually along the Potomac. But Lubbock rode home determined to throw Texas into the War Between the States, to the hilt.
In Texas, Frank Lubbock beat the drums of patriotism and alarm. He issued a proclamation urging "every able-bodied Texan" to enlist. He had received official calls for only 8,000 men from the Confederacy, but he recruited many thousands more. He anticipated the call for companies to serve in the East, and was more than prepared for it when it inevitably arrived.
There was a tremendous "tradition" in Texas, as Rupert Richardson observed, that young men should join the colors in any crisis. When the flag was raised and rallies held in every scattered, dusty town, the response, by any historical standard, was phenomenal. Richmond asked for twenty companies of infantry in the late summer of 1861, "for service in Virginia, the enlistment to be for the period of the war." Thirty-two companies answered the call. These men, drawn from dozens of distant counties, marched to Virginia, and into shot, shell, and legend, as Hood's Brigade. This was the Texan Brigade that broke the Federal lines at Gaines's Mill and was given the glorious, if dangerous, honor of first place in Longstreet's Corps. Some members survived to witness Appomattox.
The figures of the troops Texas gave the Confederacy cannot be completely reconciled; records of the time were poorly kept. The 1860 census showed there were 92,145 white men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in the state. Between 60,000 and 70,000 men saw service—two—thirds of the military-age population. Even though these figures, basically correct, include frontier service and many reenlistments, they can be reconciled in one way. Thousands of boys below eighteen, and thousands of men up to sixty and beyond, joined the Stars and Bars.
The one great contribution of Texas to the Southern cause was men. Tradition was both made and fulfilled, but at appalling human damage.
The leadership class in Texas was composed of planters and professional men; traditionally, these were more responsive to the bugle call than men from the countinghouse or factory. The great planters had feared secession, but they sustained the Southern army to the end. In each county, landowners raised unit after unit, many armed and equipped at their own expense. They filled most of the posts from captain to colonel, while the ranks were filled with tough farmboys thronging in. The rock of both armies, Blue and Gray, was this horde of small farmers. But evidence is incontrovertible that a higher percentage of the social and capitalist elite joined the colors in the South, while professional graduates of West Point commanded in every major battle on both sides.
Texas supplied 135 general officers and colonels to the South, including two professionals of superior talent, John B. Hood and Albert Sidney Johnston. Hood became a temporary full general in 1864, while Johnston's tragic death at Shiloh is believed by some historians to have markedly affected the outcome of the war. Only one native-born Texan became a Confederate general: Felix Huston Robertson. He was the last Confederate general officer to die.
Hundreds of medical doctors and lawyers enlisted or secured commissions. Doctors who drew the sword rather than the scalpel included Generals Richard Gano and Jerome Robertson, and Colonels John S. Ford and Ashbel Smith. Generals W. R. Scurry and A. W. Terrell and Colonels Hugh McLeod, John Marshall, and Roger Mills were fighting lawyers. Two high officers, Wilburn King and William Rogers, held degrees in both medicine and law. These men lent a certain blaze of glory to the Southern legions under the Bonny Blue Flag. Their blood, and the loss of this high-minded elite put a somber, lasting pall over the future of the land.
Scurry bled to death cheering his men on at Jenkin's Ferry in 1864. John Marshall, at the head of the 4th Texas, died from a minié ball at Gaines's Mill. Doctor William Rogers—"the bravest man who ever wore the gray"—fell riddled as he planted the St. Andrew's Cross on the Union parapet at Corinth, Mississippi, in 1862. The graves of the Texan educated elite lay scattered in a grim procession across six states.
Whatever their motivation, and whatever their faults, no group of men ever more bravely sustained a forlorn cause. They gave it a certain haunted holiness few Texans ever completely forgot.
Two-thirds of the Texan companies fought west of the Mississippi, in bitter, bloody battles that rarely gained recognition or national fame. Terry's Rangers were never excelled, in Union eyes, for reckless mobility and heroic dash. Two-thirds of Terry's men were killed, their bones scattered in a hundred sites. Ross's Brigade fought valiantly on both sides of the Mississippi. Here again the war took a hideous toll, not only of landowners but of ordinary men. Texas's loss in blood and bone was proportionally higher than that of any Northern state.
By 1864 the old units were ragged remnants. Companies
of infantry could hardly muster a corporal's guard; battalions could barely surround their tattered battle flags. Proud of their tradition and honors, many older units refused new blood; no replacements were accepted. This was military idiocy, but as an example of cavalier magnificence it still stands.
Many of these units were still fighting, in 1865, when the population of the South, as a whole, had forsaken the war. As military historians know, and many Americans have overlooked, Lee at Petersburg was with an army sustaining a broken nation, and not the other way around.
The sustaining of the War Between the States in Texas was a magnificent achievement overall, by a completely agricultural, frontier society totally unequipped to fight a total war against an industrial power. Southerners, between 1861 and 1865, sacrificed more to a general war than any body of Americans before or since. The losses were enormous: 200,000 soldiers died, and a quarter of Texas's most vigorous manpower was killed or incapacitated. The entire economy gradually became paralyzed, due to the Federal naval blockade that tightened by the middle of 1861. And in the areas where the armies marched the destruction of property was total. Texas was spared this last, not by chance but by a vigorous defense of its soil in the latter months of the war.
The lack of manufactures and resources and industrial skills was more fatal in the long run than the disparity in numbers between North and South. Without a navy, the Confederacy fought from isolation against impossible odds. Even so, however, the South made the cost of restoring the Union almost too great for the Northern states to bear. Confederate determination, gallantry, and military brilliance on the battlefield forced the North to fight a war of attrition. This bled the Confederacy to death, as both Grant and Lincoln knew it would, but in the summer of 1864, while General Grant was presiding over the "unbroken Union funeral train" in the Wilderness, Union morale nearly crumbled. The peace party in the North was active, calling for negotiations or arbitration by outside nations—which would have meant tacitly giving up the South. Even in November, when the disintegration of the Confederacy was obvious, Lincoln won reelection by only 200,000 votes. Millions of Northerners did not think the war was worth the price: 300,000 Union dead. The American Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in modern history, in terms of populations and forces engaged.
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