With bloodshed narrowly averted, Union supporters broke up the meeting by taking the stand and preventing the next scheduled speaker, Christopher C. Upson, from addressing the crowd. They called instead for Samuel A. Maverick, long considered to be a Union man, to take the stage. Maverick finally acceded to the wishes of the crowd but disappointed many by siding with Boring and Wilcox. The time had come for secession, Maverick admitted. Some Union men called for Judge Isaiah A. Paschall, but it was past midnight and the meeting was over. Unionists signaled a band to strike up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and marched through the town singing till the wee hours of the morning. The Union celebration in San Antonio, however, did not last long.
Anderson’s speech to the citizens of Bexar County made national headlines. Lincoln and his advisers praised the oration as eloquent, courageous, and truthful but were concerned that it was not vindictive enough toward the South. “It distributes too equally and too justly both blame and censure,” said publisher George W. Pendleton, paraphrasing the president-elect’s camp. Despite his reservations, Pendleton ordered six thousand copies of Anderson’s speech to be printed and distributed to Congress and the public. Before his speech at the Alamo, Anderson had always acted on the principle of unswerving loyalty to his country. After the speech, he became not just a national figure but also a potential tool of the Lincoln administration.2
CHAPTER EIGHT
Treachery and Treason
CHARLES ANDERSON’S TEXAS EXPERIMENT WAS an abject failure. “I am dead broke,” he complained to Rufus King on December 7. Since his bank account was overdrawn, Anderson resolved to sell his cattle, lay off two of his vaqueros, and halt construction on his house. The political crisis made loans almost impossible to procure. Without a circle of wealthy friends to support him, Anderson had few options. He begged King to get him two thousand dollars on a twelve-month term, even if it meant mortgaging his Dayton, Ohio, property. He owed fifteen hundred dollars on the former arsenal property and his creditors were not inclined to wait. On the political front, the excitement of the past month had died down. What emerged was an interesting political alignment. The non-slave-holders were pushing for secession, according to Anderson, while 70 percent of slaveholders supported the Union. Anderson hoped that the Union could be saved. He could not imagine the depth of the conspiracy in motion against it.1
The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) were already known to Anderson when he gave his speech in Alamo Square. Founder George Bickley lived in Cincinnati until he was chased out in the late 1850s. As Anderson gazed down from the stage on the night of the Alamo meeting, he saw blue cockade badges adorning numerous hats and lapels. The Knights had organized in the mid-1850s as a secret society promoting slave states in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Members wanted U.S. slaveholding states to secede, join these new territories, and form a new nation. The KGC proved to be the match that lit the fire of Texas secession. San Antonio became the headquarters for Knights of the Golden Circle activities in Texas by 1859, and every substantial town had a branch called a “castle.” U.S. military experts claimed that the Knights could call up more than eight thousand men on a few days’ notice. Their discipline was said to be stricter than that of the legitimate army. Most of the key players guiding the Texas secession drama were members or had close connections with the covert militia.2
The town was also the headquarters of the U.S. Army’s Department of Texas. In command was Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee of the First Cavalry. One of the most respected and accomplished officers in the entire army, Lee was fresh off his capture of John Brown’s gang at Harpers Ferry when he was assigned to this new command in February 1860. Lee and Charles Anderson were intimate friends. Robert Anderson and Colonel Lee were the great favorites of General Winfield Scott, for whom they served with distinction in the Mexican War. Lee made frequent trips to the Anderson residence north of San Antonio to attend dances and hunting parties. Officers in the San Antonio garrison lived in private residences and had ample time for leisure pursuits. Most socialized with the large circle of Union men and their families, and there were balls and parties almost every evening. Anderson’s handsome daughter Kitty danced with Lee and other officers, but her heart was stolen by twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant William Graham Jones. After a brief courtship, the two were engaged.3
Two opposing forces, one a formal army and the other a nascent rebel militia, watched and plotted as developments on the national scene evolved. The KGC plot was already in motion. Unbeknownst to Lee or Anderson, Major General David E. Twiggs had already played his first card the day after Lincoln’s election. Georgia native Twiggs was on leave from his former command of the Department of Texas and convalescing in New Orleans when he heard the electoral news. Despite his poor health, Twiggs wrote immediately for orders and was directed to resume command in San Antonio. He arrived back in Texas on November 27, just three days after the Alamo meeting. The man behind this move was Secretary of War John B. Floyd.
Floyd and Charles Anderson had been friends since childhood, although they had become distant in recent years as Floyd moved in lockstep with the Breckenridge set. For months the secretary had been moving federal arms and munitions into the hands of various Southern governors, so that local militias could train and prepare for secession and possible war. Until his resignation from Buchanan’s cabinet in December 1860, Floyd’s actions had made him one of the most infamous traitors of the times. But he made at least one strategic mistake. Knowing that Charles’s brother Robert was a Southerner, and assuming him in sympathy with secession, Floyd had General Scott assign Robert Anderson to Fort Moultrie at the mouth of Charleston harbor. That decision would later come back to haunt Floyd.
Lieutenant Colonel Lee was startled and perplexed by these sudden developments. Twiggs was clearly infirm. Why would Floyd relieve Lee of an important command at this critical juncture? What did his dear friend and mentor General Scott know about this? He did not wait long for answers, for Scott had been plotting as well. Near the end of October, Scott produced a paper intended for private circulation. His monograph outlined potential military strategies for the United States to consider should the Southern states secede. In retrospect, the idea was brilliant and simple. The Union would make the western theater the primary focus of early war efforts. Scott planned to immediately occupy the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers, thus severing Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and western Louisiana from the rest of the Confederacy. Once that was accomplished, the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers would be secured in a similar way.
On December 1, Scott sent these views to Anderson in San Antonio, asking that he share them with both Twiggs and Lee. Anderson gave the papers to Twiggs first, who returned them after a week. Twiggs told Anderson that it was “damned strange that General Scott should have sent the papers to you.” He then added, “I know General Scott fully believes that God had to spit on his hands to make Bob Lee and Bob Anderson, and you are Major Anderson’s brother.” Charles Anderson then took the package from Twiggs and delivered it immediately to Lee. A few days after Lee received General Scott’s papers, he summoned Anderson to his room at the boardinghouse. Charles brought along friend and confidante Dr. Willis G. Edwards. Lee felt that the publication of the papers might imply that the federal government intended to take preemptive military action, and he made Anderson promise not to publish them. The men talked at length about the secession crisis.
Anderson was violent in his denunciation of the Southern fire-eaters, whom he felt deserved most of the blame for the perilous state of affairs. Lee replied that “somebody is surely at fault, probably both factions.” When Anderson restated his opinion and suggested that a broad-based conspiracy was brewing, Lee remained silent. At this point, Edwards pointedly asked whether in such cases a man’s loyalty was due to his home state or to his nation. Lee’s decision would change the course of history. Lee did not equivocate. Surely this vexing issue had tortured him for some weeks or even months.
He chose this moment to declare his intentions to two of his close friends. Lee believed that his first allegiance was due to Virginia. The conversation ended. Lee made preparations to leave for Fort Mason, about 112 miles from San Antonio, and await a fate now held firmly by the very politicians he so loathed. He had scarcely left town when South Carolina voted to secede.
Some politicians were working feverishly behind the scenes to prevent the secession crisis from spreading. In Congress, Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky introduced a compromise bill he had conceived with the help of Larz Anderson and others, but it failed at the eleventh hour. The day after Christmas, Robert Anderson, seeing that his position was too exposed to safeguard his men, transported them from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston harbor. This move was viewed by some Southerners as an act of aggression. On January 9, the steamer Star of the West was attacked by South Carolinians determined to prevent reinforcements from entering the fort. The whole world waited to see what would happen next.
As the nation was coming apart, Union men from all over Texas scrambled to slow the secession momentum. In mid-January, Charles Anderson received a letter from Judge I. A. Paschall requesting an immediate meeting with Governor Sam Houston in Austin. Upon his arrival, Anderson learned that the governor had big plans for him. Houston desired that Anderson take control of all the forts, arsenals, arms and munitions, and other property of the United States within the state of Texas. By preempting the Knights of the Golden Circle, Houston hoped he could scotch the rebellion before it began.4
Houston’s request to General Twiggs to cede arms to the state was met with evasion. On January 22, Twiggs replied that because he was without instructions from Washington, D.C., he could not fulfill the governor’s request. After secession, Twiggs continued, if the governor repeated his demands, he would then receive an answer. Houston did not know that Twiggs had already requested to be relieved of his command nine days earlier. As Houston and Twiggs tried to outfox each another, the flames of disunion grew into a full-fledged conflagration. Four states had seceded by the time a despondent Anderson returned to Worth Springs. He immediately wrote William M. Corry asking for advice. “Our form of government is a failure,” Anderson lamented. “The dream is mere mirage. Our system . . . like all other perfect theories, fails in the experience through the amazing irrationality and malevolence of Mankind.” Though he still accused the secessionists of igniting the revolution, the abolitionists certainly bore blame as well. “If the people of the North had possessed the requisite capacity for self-government,” Anderson argued, “they never would have allowed their personal sympathies, envy and other private passions to thrust themselves into a ballot box designed for different motives.”5
While Anderson brooded, Larz managed to visit their brother Robert at Fort Sumter. He returned to Washington carrying secret messages. Larz had many influential friends in the capital and worked tirelessly to achieve some sort of last-ditch compromise. Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee remained at Fort Mason, awaiting the action of the other Southern states. Texas did not keep him waiting long.6 Sam Houston, despite doing all he could to forestall a secession convention, was losing the battle. Ultimately he was forced to yield to a petition of sixty-one prominent citizens from all over the state. Nearly all were KGC members. The secession convention was held on January 28. Houston again ordered Anderson to Austin, and the Texas Union leaders awaited the results of the convention. The vote was 166 to 7 in favor of secession, to be ratified by popular vote on February 23. “The deed is done,” Anderson wrote to his former law partner Rufus King on February 9. “Texas goes out of the Union to which she never ought to have belonged.”7
The KGC did not wait for ratification. On January 29, they established a Committee of Safety to begin taking “control of the arms and munitions of war within her limits.” They feared “coercion” from the twenty-eight hundred U.S. troops within the state’s borders. The committee boldly stated that it expected that General Twiggs, “a Southern man by birth and friendly to the cause of the South,” would surrender U.S. Army property. In case he refused, the committee commissioned former U.S. marshal Henry Eustace McCulloch to persuade him otherwise.
It was all a ruse, as Twiggs was in on the plot all along. McCulloch and his band of nearly a thousand armed citizens confronted 160 federal troops. Twiggs was permitted to feign surrender to an over-whelming force of arms on February 16. As it so happened, Lee was returning to San Antonio that very day. When his ambulance arrived at his boardinghouse in the middle of the afternoon, it was surrounded by men wearing a curious red badge that Lee had never seen before. “Who are these men?” Lee asked Mrs. Caroline Darrow. “They are McCulloch’s,” she replied. “General Twiggs surrendered everything to the state this morning and we are all prisoners of war.”
Lee was visibly upset; some later claimed they saw tears in his eyes as he spoke. “Has it come as soon as this?” he asked. Unsure of his status, Lee walked to a nearby hotel, registered, and changed into civilian garb. He then proceeded to army headquarters, now occupied by McCulloch’s men. The commissioners told Lee that unless he resigned immediately and joined the rebellion, he would not be allowed to transport his personal effects out of the state. Remorse turned quickly to anger as Lee steadfastly refused to recognize this apparent coup and asserted that he had no obligations to an illegal gang of revolutionaries. He then sought out Charles Anderson and asked him to look after his belongings until they could be sent east. Together they walked to the commission merchant.
While on their way to the warehouse, Lee asked Anderson if he remembered their conversation of a few weeks previous. Anderson said that he did indeed. Lee reiterated his decision. “I still think,” Lee insisted, “as I told you and Doctor Edwards that my loyalty to Virginia ought to take precedence over that which is due the federal government. I shall so report myself at Washington. If she stands by the old Union, so will I. But if she secedes, though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution, then I will still follow my native state with my sword, and if need be with my life.” Anderson felt compelled to respond. “The selection of the place in which we were born,” he explained, “was not an act of our own volition; but when we took the oath of allegiance to our government, it was an act of manhood, and that oath we cannot break.”
“I know you think and feel very differently,” Lee replied, “but I can’t help it. These are my principles, and I must follow them.” Lee left the following day. On his arrival in Washington City, Winfield Scott made Lee an enticing offer. Scott proposed that he be promoted immediately to the rank of colonel. The president had further authorized Scott to offer Lee command of the entire army, second to only the aged Scott himself. Lee repeated what he had told Anderson and left for his plantation at Arlington, Virginia.8
Anderson wondered what the future held for him and his family. A week later, he received a disturbing telegram. His son Latham, an 1859 graduate of West Point and first lieutenant in the U.S. Fifth Infantry, had lost his first battle to a large force of Texas Rangers in New Mexico. He had escaped unharmed. Would Anderson and his family be so lucky? Nerves were fraying inside the Anderson household. Anderson wrote that his terrified wife “now fancies K.G.C.s, Vigilance Committees, or Committees of Safety in every road or street.” With Texas voters formally endorsing a secession that had already taken place, Anderson saw all but the most hard-core Unionists jump on the bandwagon or at least cooperate to save their fortunes and their skins. He himself would have none of it.
“In two years more,” Anderson wrote King, “my income from horses would probably have begun at between $5 and 7,000 per annum.” But rather than be “an alien and an enemy to [his] native land,” he vowed to “choose instant poverty.” Anderson decided to leave as soon as the Committee of Safety would allow it. He sold Kentucky lands in Madison and Franklin Counties to help finance the move. “I might be off before a month—though it may not
be in 6,” he predicted. He suspected that leaving would not be so easy. While many hoped for peaceable secession, Anderson did not “expect to see that miracle of miracles,” he wrote King on March 24. Two separate republics with a twenty-five-hundred-mile border, separated with such bitterness and animosity and goaded by fanatics on both sides could hardly coexist peacefully. “I am compelled to droop my head and close my eyes against the rising pandemonium of the near future,” Anderson admitted.9
Two weeks later, Robert Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter and war became inevitable. Late April was the scheduled time for federal troops leaving Texas to leave from the coast on their homeward journeys. The outbreak of hostilities changed those plans. On April 23, Confederate Colonel Earl Van Dorn arrested his counterpart, Colonel Carlos A. Waite, confining him and his staff officers as formal prisoners of war. Other U.S. forces were already on their way to the coast. Van Dorn went after them. It took Confederate soldiers more than two weeks to detain or capture most of the exiting U.S. troops. The last confrontation came about fifteen miles west of San Antonio on the old military road at a place called San Lucas Springs. U.S. commander Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Van Duzer Reeve and 270 men confronted nearly 1,400 Confederate partisans. Neither side wanted bloodshed, so Reeve surrendered his command and marched his troops into San Antonio on May 10. Any hope of Union resistance in Texas was over without a shot being fired.
The U.S. troops held in San Antonio and elsewhere had few options in their confinement. Their captors encouraged them to renounce their allegiance to the Union and join the Confederate ranks. Few did so. An alternative was to sign a “parole of honor” by which they agreed not to take up arms against nor leave the Confederate States until such time as they were either exchanged or released. Before battles raged in the east, the prospects for exchange seemed bright, so most chose this path. The same code of honor that protected U.S. soldiers did not apply to the general public. Union men became particularly vulnerable.10
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