Michener, James A.

by Texas

  On the night of 9 August 1862, with safety in Mexico near at hand, Ludwig Allerkamp was most uneasy when the men commanding the German escape decided to spend a relaxed evening under the stars rather than forge ahead to the Rio Grande. 'We should get out of Texas immediately,' Ludwig argued, but the commander lulled him with assurances that no Confederate troops would bother them, or even care that they were heading for Mexico.

  It was a lovely summer's night graced with fresh-shot turkey, the inevitable choral singing and even several bottles of San Antonio beer used to toast homes in Texas: Till we come back in peace.' And of course, when the eating ended there were the inevitable formal discussions which Germans seemed to need; a man from Fredericksburg served as chairman for 'Crushed Hopes in Ger-

  many,' and a doctor for 'Health Problems We Will Encounter in Mexico,' but at the conclusion of the meeting Ludwig suggested: i think we should post sentries tonight,' and when asked why, he responded: 'We are of military age and we are leaving the country. We could be arrested as deserters.' The others laughed at his fears.

  General Quimper said as the sun set: 'We were damned lucky to have overtaken them,' but he was grievously disappointed to find that instead of the fifteen hundred Germans his spy had reported, there were fewer than seventy. 'Not many Germans,' Quimper told Duff, 'but they form a dangerous body,' and every precaution was taken to see that none escaped.

  The Confederate troops were astonished at how close to the Germans they were able to move without detection, and the contingents that waded across the Nueces to cut off any rush to the south splashed water when two men fell in, but even this did not alert the sleepers.

  At three in the morning Ludwig Allerkamp awakened and grew uneasy when Emil did not answer his call. He started to look for him, but before he could find the young man he stumbled into a nest of soldiers, who fired at him indiscriminately; they missed him but killed his son, who had leaped to his feet when the firing started.

  Now the shooting became general, and terribly confused, with the Confederate soldiers firing their deadly Sharps directly into the terrified mass of Germans, who tried to establish a defensive line from which to return fire. Some fell, shot dead; some splashed back across the Nueces and fled north; most stood firm and fought it out against vastly superior odds. Allerkamp, raging because his son had been slain in such a senseless battle, was one who stayed, and in the heat of morning he saw that others he respected were with him too. Cried one: 'Lass uns unser Leben so teuer wie moglich verkaufen!' (Let us sell our lives as dearly as we can.) And this the man did, blazing away until he fell.

  Three soldiers in gray charged at Allerkamp, stabbing at him with their bayonets and shouting their battle cry 'For Southern Freedom.' When the bloody skirmish ended shortly after dawn, there were nineteen Germans and two Confederates killed in one of the least justified actions of the war.

  There were also nine wounded Germans who, seeing no possibility of escape, surrendered. And it was what happened to them that caused the battle at the Nueces to be so bitterly remembered, for while they lay helpless in the morning sunlight, Captain Duff asked Quimper to help him drag them off to one side. When

  Major Cobb heard about this he cried automatically: 'Oh Jesus'' but he was too late to interfere, for as he ran to halt whatever evil thing was afoot, he heard shots, and when Duff and Quimper returned they were smiling.

  'What in hell have you done 7 ' Cobb shouted, and Duff said 'We don't take prisoners.'

  When Cobb checked the battlefield, he found that twenty-eight Germans had been slain and thirty-seven had escaped. I would be killed later trying to cross the Rio Grande, nine others were killed elsewhere, one crept back to Fredericksburg, and the rest escaped either into Mexico or California, where, as Quimper had feared, some of them joined the Union army

  On the way back to the Red River, Major Cobb pondered extraordinary act, and as a partisan of the South he felt obligated to find an excuse, if there was one: If the Germans had escaped into Mexico, certainly they'd have run to New Orleans or Baltimore to fight against us. . . . We've instituted a legal draft, and they refused to comply. . . . This is war, and they killed sonic of our good men. But no matter how he rationalized Quimper's actions, he could construct no justification. Damn it all, no gentleman that I know would shoot nine helpless prisoners.

  As a result of this self-examination, Cobb made two major decisions. The first was inevitable: 1 shall no longer place my honor in the hands of Yancey Quimper. He disgusts me. The second, representing his growing maturity, was reported in a letter to his wife:

  I've been thinking about honor and battle a good deal recently, and especially those fine talks we had with the Peel people in Vicksbury I'm fed up with second best. I love the people in Walter Scott's novels and want to conduct myself like them. 1 made a terrible mistake when 1 named our plantation Lakeview. Means nothing. From here on, with your permission, it's to be Lammermoor That sings to the heart.

  On the night before they reached the Red River, with Major Cobb encamped as far from General Quimper as he decently could, another soldier embittered by events at the Nueces told him: 'You know, Major, I've heard that Quimper was never a real general, and his behavior at San Jacinto ... he talks so much about it, maybe it wasn't the way he says.' If such rumors were true, Cobb thought, they would explain a lot.

  Cobb refused to ride with Quimper when they headed north to duty along the Red River, and he suspected that when

  they met, there would be a certain tenseness. But the big, flabby fellow was as sickeningly jovial as ever: 'Great to have you back, Reuben. Important work up here.'

  Trying to mask his dislike, Cobb temporized: 'Yancey, the way you handled those German prisoners . . .' Quimper leaned in to forestall criticism: 'We did all right. But now we're onto something much bigger.'

  And on the very next day Cobb was with Quimper when two spies came before them to report:

  'Evil elements have slipped down from Arkansas. They've accumulated massive arms and have conspired with Texas citizens to stage a vast uprising. Our slaves are to cooperate when the signal is given and kill all white men in the district, women and children too.'

  Cobb, remembering that Quimper's other spy had detected fifteen hundred Germans in motion when there were actually fewer than seventy, was reluctant to accept this new call to frenzy, but when he quietly initiated his own inquiries, he learned to his dismay that there was a plan for insurrection and that nearly a hundred participants were incriminated. So once more he was thrown in with Quimper, whether he wished it or not, and now began one of the startling events of the war, as far as Texas was involved.

  The frightened defenders of the Confederacy placed their security in the hands of General Quimper, who, with considerable skill, arranged for a coordinated swoop upon the plotters. This move bagged some seventy conspirators, and there was serious talk of hanging them all. General Quimper loudly supported this decision, but Major Cobb rallied the more sober citizens, who devised a more reasonable procedure. A self-appointed citizens committee, hoping to avoid any criticism of Southern justice through the accidental hanging of the innocent, met and nominated twelve of the best-respected voters of the area, including two doctors and two clergymen, to serve as a court of law—judge, jury, hangman —and these twelve, following rules of evidence and fair play, would try the accused.

  It was this laborious process which Quimper wanted to by-pass with his waiting nooses, but men like Cobb insisted upon it, so on the first day of October 1862 the drumhead court convened. Its first batch of prisoners was quickly handled:

  'Dr. Henry Childs, in accordance with the decision of this Court you will be taken from your place of confinement, on the fourth day of October '62 between the hours of twelve and two o'clock of said day,

  and hunt; by the neck until you arc dead, and may Cod have mere) on your soul '

  The executions were held in midafternoon so that townspeople could gather about the hanging tree, a stately e
lm at the ed town from whose branches three or sometimes four corpses would dangle. No observers seemed dissatisfied with the hangings, for the victims had been legally judged and the verdicts delivered without rancor. There was, moreover, considerable interest shown in the manner with which each of the condemned met Ins death, and those who did so in ways deemed proper were afterward applauded.

  On and on the fearful litany continued: Ephraim Childs, brother of the above, hanged, A. D. Scott, hanged: 'He viewed calmly the preparations for his execution. And when the last awful moment arrived he jumped heavily from the carriage; and falling near three feet, dislocated his neck, he died without the violent contraction of a single muscle'; M. D. Harper, hanged, I. W. P. Lock, hanged: 'His conduct throughout revealed all the elements of a depraved nature, and he died upon the tree exhibiting that defiance of death that usually seizes hold on the last moments of a depraved, wicked and abandoned heart.' His crime, and that of the others: he had preferred the Union to the South.

  After twenty festive hangings had occurred, Major Cobb was sickened by the illegality of such actions, for he had reason to believe that several men clearly innocent had been hanged He spoke with certain humane men on the jury, advising against any further executions, and his arguments were so persuasive—'Excess merely brings discredit to our cause'—that the hangings were stopped, and nineteen additional men who would otherwise surely have been executed were to be set free, an act which most citizens approved, for they had wearied of the ringing of the bell that announced the next assembly at the hanging tree. Quunper, however, railed against what he called 'this miscarriage of justice.'

  'Hang them all!' he bellowed so repeatedly that the rougher element in town began to take up the cry, and he would have succeeded in organizing a mob to break down the jail had not Cobb and others prevailed upon the men not to stain their just cause by such a reprehensible act. That night, however, someone in the bushes near town—who, was never known—shot two well-regarded citizens, partisans of the Confederacy, and now no arguments could save the men still in jail. Quimper wanted to hang them immediately. Cobb insisted that they be given a legal trial,

  and they were, fifteen minutes of rushed testimony and the embittered verdict:

  'C A Jones known as Humpback, James Powers known as Carpenter, Thomas Baker known as Old Man, and nine others tried on the same bill, all found guilty and sentenced to be hung, the evidence having revealed a plot which for its magnitude, infamy, treachery and barbarity is without a parallel in the annals of crime.'

  So thirty-nine men guilty only of siding with an unacceptable moral position were hanged; three who had nebulous connections with the Confederate military were tried by court-martial and hanged; two others were shot trying to escape. But this was not a lynching or a case of mob frenzy; it was an instance of the heat of warfare in which men dedicated to one cause could not see any justification in the other. Even in its fury the jury endeavored to maintain some semblance of order, and of the accused men brought before it, twenty-four were found not guilty and set free.

  Cobb, a tempestuous man who had always fought his battles openly, was now thoroughly revolted by the hangings, and in a letter to his wife, posted on the last day of the executions, he wrote:

  There was a man in jail who was charged with being a deserter from the Southern army, and a horse thief. When the jury on this day failed to furnish any Northerners to hang, the bloodthirsty men outside took that man from the jail and hanged him.

  Two days later Cobb left his post at the Red River without permission, rode south to his plantation, and announced that he was organizing a unit for service with General Lee. Among his first volunteers was his cousin Somerset, who apologized to his ailing wife: 'Lissa, it tears my heart to see you in worsening health, and I know it's my duty to stay with you, but I simply cannot abide in idleness when others die for our cause.' The brothers' first flush of patriotism waned when they learned that they would be serving not in the cavalry with Lee, but in an infantry unit, for as Reuben exploded: 'Any Texan with a shred of dignity would ride to war, not march.' But march they did, to Vicksburg.

  The hinge of victory in the west would be Vicksburg, and as the Cobbs moved toward it, always striving to join up with their parent regiment already in position at Vicksburg, they could hear their soldiers grousing: 'We still ain't got no horses, and that's a

  disgrace. And we still ain't got enough rifles, and that's a disaster. And we're bein' led by a Northerner, and that's disgusting '

  Yes, the army which was to defend Vicksburg was commanded by a Philadelphia Quaker who despite his pacifist religion had attended West Point, where he had acquired a fine reputation Marrying a Southern belle from Virginia, he considered himself a resident of his bride's family plantation, where he became more Southern than Jefferson Davis. A man of credibility and power, he had not wavered when the great decision of North or South confronted him; he chose the South of his wife's proud family and quickly established himself as one of the abler Confederate generals. Now General John C. Pemberton had a command on which the safety of the South depended, and his men, who had been born in the South, did not approve.

  'With all the superb soldiers we have,' Reuben growled, 'why do we have to rely on a Northerner of doubtful loyalty 7 If Vicksburg falls, the Mississippi falls, and if that river goes, the Confederacy is divided and Texas could fall.' He lowered his voice. And if Texas falls, the world falls.'

  He was also having trouble with a new officer assigned to his unit, Captain Otto Macnab, who had reported to the bivouac area with guns and pistols sticking out in all directions. Some men in Cobb's force had Enfields of powerful range, some had the old Sharps that could knock down a house, and a few had old frontier single-shot rifles which their grandfathers had used against Indians.

  But there were nearly two dozen in the company who had no armament at all, and Major Cobb fumed about this, dispatching numerous letters to Austin begging for guns. None were available, he was told, and so he moved among his men, trying to find any soldier who had more than one, and of course he came upon Captain Macnab, who had an arsenal but when he tried to pry guns loose from him, he ran into real trouble: 1 don't give up mv guns to anybody.'

  'If I give you an order . . .' Cobb suddenly remembered from Macnab's enlistment papers that he had been a Ranger, and Somerset had warned: 'Reuben, never tangle with a Ranger Mv brother Persifer had Rangers in his command and he said they were an army of their own, a law to themselves.'

  'They're in my command now,' Major Cobb had replied, "and Macnab will do what I say .'

  'Don't bet on that,' Sett had said, and now when his cousin tried to take one of Macnab's guns, the redheaded warrior met real opposition.

  'Isn't it reasonable,' Cobb began, 'that if you have two rifles and the next man has none . . . ?'

  'I know how to use a rifle, maybe he don't.'

  There might have been an ugly scene had not Somerset intervened: 'Aren't you the Macnab who served in Mexico with my brother?'

  'Colonel Persifer Cobb 7 ' Macnab asked, and when Sett nodded, Macnab said: "He knew how to fight. I hope he's on our side now,' and Cobb replied: 'No, he's tending our family plantation in Carolina.'

  A month before, that statement would have been correct, for Persifer Cobb, like many of the great plantation managers throughout the South, had been asked to stay at home, producing stuffs required for the war effort, but as the fortunes of battle began slowly to turn against the South, men like him had literally forced their way to the colors, sometimes riding far distances to enlist, and as a former West Point man, his services were welcomed.

  So now three Cobbs of the same generation were in uniform: Colonel Persifer in northern Virginia; Major Reuben in charge of replacement troops for the Second Texans; and Captain Somerset. There were also five Cobb sons from the three families, while at the various plantations the wives of the absent officers endeavored to hold the farms and mills together: Tessa Mae at Edisto, Millicent at Lak
eview, and Petty Prue at the newly christened Lammermoor. The Cobbs were at war.

  Major Cobb wisely withdrew his attempt at forcing Macnab to surrender one of his guns, but he was gratified when his tough little officer came into camp one day with seven rifles of varied merit which he had scrounged from surrounding farms. 'They'll all fire,' he told Cobb. 'Not saying how straight, but if you get close enough, that don't matter.'

  When the contingent crossed over to the east bank of the Mississippi, Major Cobb saw that his Texans would have to fight their way into Vicksburg, for a strong Union detachment was dug in between them and the town. He could have been forgiven had he turned back, but this never occurred to him. Acting as his own scout and probing forward, he identified the difficulties and gathered his men: if we make a hurried swing to the east, we can circumvent the Northern troops, then dash back and in to Vicksburg.'

  'What protects our left flank if they hear us and attack 7 ' Macnab asked, and Cobb said: 'You do.'

  'Give me a couple dozen good shots and we'll hold them off."

  Through the dark night Otto coached his team, and at two he said: 'Catch some sleep,' hut he continued to prowl the terrain over which they would fight. Just before dawn a Galveston volunteer asked: if we do get in to Vicksburg, can we hold it, with a general like Pemberton in charge?' and Otto gave him a promise solemnly, as if taking a sacred oath: 'When we set up our lines at Vicksburg, hell itself won't budge us.'

  This reckless promise did not apply to the battle next morning at Big Black River, for Grant was moving with such incredible swiftness that he overtook the Confederates before dawn, and launched such a powerful attack that he drove them right across the deep ravines and back to the gates of Vicksburg.