Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  With sufficient munitions and any kind of industrial machine, the South would have made Union victory unfeasible.

  The Federal blockade forced an immediate economic revolution in Texas. Cotton continued to be grown, but it could be exported only with great difficulty. More acreage went to corn and other food crops. The departure of the men threw the burden of supplying food and clothing on women and slaves, and it also threw the plantations back on their own resources. The Texas cotton plantation was never a self-sufficient estate, like the Mexican hacienda. It was a capitalistic enterprise. The most progressive planters had long bought even their tools and slave clothing from the Northern factories.

  Plantation families worked to spin cloth for uniforms; it was remarked that travelers could not approach any house without hearing the sound of wheels or looms. The big plantations and isolated settlements established shops to try to make such necessities as hoes, knives, and shirts, from scratch. Surprising progress was made in some areas. Through the efforts of a state board, 40,000 pairs of wool and cotton cards were secured from Europe and imported through Mexico. Texas was able to sell some $2,000,000 in cotton by hauling it to the Rio Grande during the war. This exchange was invaluable.

  Wives and daughters could make uniforms at home, but other military needs proved more difficult. A cap and gun factory was built at Austin, the first in the state. A region where almost the entire population went armed had never thought of making its own weapons; the North could do it better. The Austin arsenal forged only a handful of cannon, all of doubtful quality. Meanwhile, though dozens of ambitious charters for various industrial projects were issued, all of these dreams fell through. Grandiose plans were discussed for all sorts of manufactures, but in Texas there was no infrastructure for industry. Skills, tools, and transportation were all lacking. Lawyers drew up charters; the legislature approved them; the factories were never built.

  The penitentiary at Huntsville produced 1,500,000 yards of cloth each year with convict labor. Salt works were established in several parts of the state, since military stores required huge amounts of salt. New ironworks were erected near Jefferson, Rusk, and Austin, while officials struggled with the realization that dishes, cups, candles, knives, and spoons, which had always been so conveniently bought abroad, now had to be made at home. Actually, Texas publicly and privately made an impressive total of uniforms, hats, shoes, and produced an enormous amount of bacon and flour. Tragically, little of this total ever reached the hungry and ragged Confederate armies, because there were few roads and no rails.

  The crops were fortunately good during the war years. No community really suffered from lack of food. Families lived on yams, used pipe ashes for soda, and drank burnt okra for a coffee substitute. No substitute for sugar—also cut off—was found. But a great pride was taken in this austerity, because it supported the war. A thousand irritations and minor disasters, such as the breakage or loss of irreplaceable items, were borne cheerfully. Clothing wore out, but now there were patriotic songs about "homespun dresses, like the Southern ladies wear."

  One horror of the war years was the disappearance of medicines. The Union placed medical supplies, including all anesthetics, on the war contraband list. This was a hardheaded act of modern war, but few things caused more suffering and resentment in the South. Confederate hospitals, military and civilian, were tragic and hideous places late in the war.

  The greatest burdens fell on the frontier women, who had to go into the fields with hoe and plow to raise food for their families. Farm work by women was not an American tradition. Women were used to grinding, endless labor, but field work often exceeded their strength and skill. That so much food was grown, and few families actually went hungry, can only be laid to the wartime burst of patriotic cooperation that suffused the majority. Thousands of soldiers left wives or children without adequate means of support. But as Oran R. Roberts observed, "An almost universal humane feeling inspired people of wealth as well as those in moderate circumstances to help the indigent families of soldiers in the field and the women who had lost husbands and sons by sickness or in battle."

  The large plantations opened their granaries freely. Citizens surrendered their specie, and women donated jewelry to provide foreign exchange for blockade runners. Years of accumulated wealth, of all kinds, was willingly given up to the needs of war. Relief committees were active, collecting food, clothing, and money. In Houston alone, $3,000 per week was raised by private subscription by the start of 1863.

  The government exacted tithes of produce, hogs, and various goods to supply the army. But by the third year of war there was a general realization of the widespread destitution of soldier families. In 1863, Texas appropriated $600,000 for direct relief of soldier families. By 1864, 74,000 women and minor children were on the state war relief rolls, showing again the enormous drain of manpower from the state. An agrarian society, committed beyond its powers, was beginning to exhibit unbearable strains.

  An agricultural economy could put a large army in the field for a season or two. It was utterly incapable of sustaining a war of attrition that went on for years. The heroism with which it tried, and the valiant struggles that took place on a hundred thousand scattered Texas farms, must always remain a source of American pride.

  One remarkable aspect of the war years was the behavior of the Negro slaves. Thousands of able-bodied men were left in charge of women, old men, and boys on the river bottoms. A region that had long been haunted by the specter of slave revolt—it was only months since the hysteria of 1859—did not record a single incident. As the chief justice of Texas stated: "It was a subject of general remark that the negroes were more docile and manageable during the war than at any other period, and for this they deserve the lasting gratitude of their owners in the army." The fact that the slaves labored mightily and peaceably through the war has never adequately been explained. But certainly more humane treatment helped, and many slaves seemed to have been genuinely caught up in a feeling for a plantation, land, and society in which they had no stake. There were innumerable cases where a white mistress directed the efforts of dozens of slaves, in isolated places. No white woman or child was ever molested, and even more remarkably, fewer slaves tried to run away than in the previous years.

  While Governor Francis Lubbock worked devotedly to support the Confederate nation, certain significant strains and tensions between government and people, and between the state and Confederate regimes, soon developed. Although Lubbock urged every man into uniform, saw that laws were passed suspending debts for the duration, pushed through bonds and special local taxes, and authorized the receipt of Confederate paper to pay state obligations—all revolutionary acts in 19th-century America—there was still enormous ineptitude in certain places.

  One source of trouble was General Paul Octave Hébert, the commander of the Military Department of Texas. The appointment of Hébert to this post was unfortunate. The General was a West Pointer, but he had spent much time in Europe, and he affected continental military styles. He was arrogant, arbitrary, and cavalier; he also lacked common sense. Thomas North, in his Five Years in Texas: Or What You Did Not Hear During the War, described Hébert as a "constitutional ape." He "preferred red-top boots, a rat-tail moustache, fine equipage, and a suite of waiters. . . . He was too much of a military coxcomb to suit the ideas and ways of a pioneer country; besides, he was suspected of cowardice." Texans could have put up with his costumes and airs, probably, had Hébert spent less time meddling in state affairs and more time seeking the sound of the guns.

  In November 1862, Hébert issued an order barring the export of cotton except under government control. On the surface this order made sense, except that the Confederate authorities were not equipped to implement it efficiently.

  Since July 1861, the Texas coast had been under naval blockade. No cotton, the state's only resource, could be shipped to hungry European markets. But Mexico provided a loophole. Baled cotton was hauled south to the Rio Grande,
delivered in Matamoros, and shipped from the Mexican side of the river in the thousands of British and French sails that congregated in the Gulf. Treaties had been negotiated with Mexican authorities in Matamoros to expedite this by the Confederate commander at Brownsville. A vast trade quickly built up; foreign ships by the hundreds lay off the mouth of the Rio Grande, while their captains clamored for cargoes and bid the price of cotton to enormous sums. The American war had caught British mills by surprise.

  To protect this trade against a possible Yankee breach of the doctrine of freedom of the seas, the French and British governments sent strong squadrons to the Gulf. It was said in Texas that Admiral de Villeneuve's ships, not respect for legality, kept Federal patrol vessels far north of the Rio Grande.

  The haul from the Colorado to the border was long, arduous, and expensive; there were only trails through the chaparral. But the brush country was white with falling cotton lint, because the fiber sold for a dollar, gold, per pound.

  Although Texas received $2,000,000 from this export, and got back vital guns, medicines, and tools that could be gotten nowhere else, two things about this enterprise disturbed the Confederate authorities. One was that a great amount of this cotton ended up in Yankee mills—Northern manufacturers were just as desperate as the British, and sometimes, through agents, outbid them. The trade was all in the South's favor even so, but in some governmental minds it became contaminated.

  The other objection was more valid. The trade was in private hands.

  While the wagons returned from the Rio Grande with nails, medicines, Napoleon muskets, and Enfield rifles and Kerr revolvers, they also brought back sugar, coffee, wax candles, and a few French gowns. Merchants were merchants, and the profits on luxury items were immense. By 1862, even near-luxuries and things formerly considered necessities brought fabulous prices in Texas. Every civilized amenity had been cut off, but there were people in Texas who would pay any price for certain things, war or no war. Whenever a merchant arrived back from the Rio Grande actual riots were sometimes set off, with housewives clamoring for goods.

  The pioneer Mary Maverick of San Antonio wrote in her journal that after a tiring battle, "wedged up and swaying for hours," she finally fought her way to a counter and purchased one bolt of domestic cloth, one pair of shoes, and one dozen wax candles for $180. The broker in question paid $60,000 in specie for this shipment, and he sold everything out in less than a week.

  This diversion of resources to "nonessentials" understandably concerned the military. But Hébert's orders did not improve matters; it merely threw impossible bureaucratic bottlenecks into the process. The whole trade was halted, and here Hébert got himself into serious disfavor with important men.

  Hébert was already hated because of other policies, especially his implementation of the Confederate conscription laws. He was relieved because of these pressures and replaced with General John Bankhead Magruder, fresh from the Peninsula campaign. Magruder was a "dashing and festive" soldier; he took personal command of certain military operations then proceeding at Galveston, and he was a leader better suited to Texas styles.

  But Bankhead Magruder was equally unequipped to command the vital export trade. He issued supposedly helpful instructions that only made things worse. In April 1863, he disgustedly withdrew all controls, to see if this would help; but this move was intolerable to the Confederate commissioners and Congress. A law was enacted to regulate the trade, but which was again unworkable, and soon even the most patriotic merchants and agents were conspiring to get around the government.

  The Confederacy thus never fully exploited the Mexican loophole. Too little cotton would have reached the border in any case without roads or rails, but soldiers and bureaucrats without logistic or business experience either stopped the trade or let more and more foreign exchange be lost to speculators and profiteers.

  This logistical ineptitude colored the whole war and shadowed the genuine Southern battle gallantry. The lawyers and landed gentry who formed the Richmond government could write florid ballads to the valor of Southern manhood, while Southern manhood bled futilely away. They moved perceptibly away from the American federal system toward an aristocratic parliamentary regime, on the British model, but this did not face the Southern problem. The traditions and reality of a colonial-economy South did not prepare men to run a railroad, much less understand and manage a logistical complex.

  Hood's Brigade charged cheering across wheat stubble in bare feet, while thousands of good leather shoes gathered dust in Confederate North Carolina. Ross's veterans fought with empty bellies, with five million range cattle roaming Texas. The premier soldiers of the South, such as Hood and Johnston, were splendid tacticians, with a greater gusto for their trade than their often-amateur counterparts from the North. But the industrially trained managers behind the Union far better understood the strategic shape of modern war. They raised, equipped, and prodigally maintained 2,000,000 bluecoats in the field; they outdid Napoleon, which few Continental observers—even with their hearts in the South—failed to see.

  The South raised less than a million men, and could not feed these.

  The basic loyalty of the bulk of Texans did not waver during the war. But patriotic rallies and real efforts could not hide the fact that after 1862 the conflict began to take an inevitable toll. The early euphoria vanished, as the Southwestern states were increasingly thrown on their own. The strategic brilliance of the Federal seizure of the Mississippi split Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas from the South; it not only stopped Texan food and clothing from reaching the fronts, but it caused consternation in the West. In June 1862, the governor of Arkansas stated that if the western states were to be left to their fate, the sooner they knew it the better. Although Lubbock cooperated fully with the Confederate authorities, held several meetings, and helped get a high-level Trans-Mississippi command, under General Edmund Kirby-Smith, approved, bitterness increased. A move grew in Texas, not to make peace with the Yankees but to secede from the Confederate States.

  In early 1863, Governor Lubbock referred to "signs of a latent dissatisfaction . . . if not a positive disloyalty to the Confederacy." He worked to halt this. He called a special legislative session. He doubled taxes and began the first statewide soldiers' relief. These measures were more apparent than real. By this time, the internal and external credit of Texas was collapsing. The old recourse to unsecured currency went its usual way: Confederate scrip was only good so long as confidence in the Confederate government lasted. Now, Texas notes and warrants, backed by nothing but a promise to pay at some future date, depreciated into worthlessness. The state government maintained elaborate accounts, but stayed heavily in debt even in paper money terms. The accounts actually became meaningless: taxes were levied, and paid, in worthless bills. This financial and fiscal collapse did nothing to assist business and industry.

  Inevitably, there was great speculation in real goods against soaring inflation. Few things caused more bitter complaint from the people at large, but the government was powerless to find a solution. The final misery was that war relief paid to widows and orphans was now paid in currency that could buy nothing.

  The real cancer of internal disaffection, however, did not center around money but on the Confederate draft. By 1862, an incredible number of Texas men had volunteered for service; but Lee, in Virginia, faced a constant deficit in numbers. Lee's personal influence was instrumental in securing the passage of a Confederate conscription law. The concept, though this has been obscured by the enormous Southern war effort, was no more popular in Texas than it was to prove later in the North.

  For one thing, all the men who wanted to fight, or felt they could leave their families, had already gone. For another, there was very little available manpower left on the western frontier. It was not possible to take all men from an agrarian society without grave damage.

  The first law, passed in April 1862, applied to all white males between eighteen and thirty-five. Soon after, the limits
were raised to fifty and dropped to seventeen. While this early draft is frequently praised as military realism, it had a definitely seamy side.

  This draft law was poorly drawn and executed. It was discriminatory and unevenly applied. Officeholders, even petty ones, were exempt, as were men "considered indispensable." Exemptions in medicine and frontier defense made sense, but substitution was permitted. As in the North, a wealthy man could hire a poor one to go in his place. Finally, in Texas, the law was interpreted to exempt almost any substantial man of property and affairs. It was regarded bitterly, both by the civilian population and a large proportion of the soldiers, including those who had volunteered.

  Resistance to the law was immediate. Thousands of citizens protested it on principle. General Hébert's reaction, in May 1862, was to put all Texas under martial law. Hébert appointed provost marshals to administer conscription. These officers were responsible only to himself. From this time forward, large parts of Texas were regularly placed under military rule; the powers of the provosts were virtually unlimited. Both Lubbock and the state supreme court reluctantly upheld these acts. This meant there could be no appeal against a Confederate provost marshal's decision.