Jim’s dependency on a successful cotton crop mirrored the Confederacy’s larger economic strategy. Secessionist leaders promised that the South’s cotton exports would make the Confederate States of America a prosperous independent nation, and that Britain’s and France’s dependency on the South’s cotton would force them to recognize the new nation. Cotton represented 60 percent of the nation’s exports in 1860, and the South grew 75 percent of the world’s cotton supply. Now in full rebellion, Confederates were putting their “King Cotton” theory to the test, and growers such as Jim played a critical role.1
President Abraham Lincoln and his commanding general, Winfield Scott, understood the South’s dependence on exports and responded with a blockade of southern ports.2 In those early months, most Southerners held out hope that secession would pass peacefully or thought the fighting back east would last only a few weeks. In Texas, two state militia units easily surrounded the Union headquarters in San Antonio, and Maj. Gen. D. E. Twiggs surrendered 10 percent of the Union army. Those prisoners who wanted to remain joined the state militias, and the rest boarded ships and sailed for Union ports. Texas seized three million dollars’ worth of federal military matériel.3 Enthusiastic about secession, Texans volunteered in numbers far larger than the new Confederate army could absorb, equip, or pay.
Texans didn’t worry about Union invasion from the east because they knew the Mississippi and Sabine rivers were formidable obstacles, but the state was vulnerable on two fronts.4 The far superior U.S. Navy could attack the coast at will and slow the export of cotton, and on the western frontier, the Union cavalry’s withdrawal meant Apache and Comanche warriors could raid white settlements with impunity. Governor Edward Clark ordered troops to strengthen the defenses around Galveston and sent state militias to man western forts.5
In Falls County, white men did little more than formalize the Committees of Safety they had formed to guard against rebellious slaves. Officers who had served in the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War took command of the small units. Their main mission was to protect the 1,654 slaves living in Falls County, whose market value was $496,200.6
The Tomlinson Hill slaves added value to Jim’s real estate holdings by replacing his log cabin with a framed home. They also built new slave cabins about a quarter mile from Jim’s house.7
In the summer of 1861, Sarah Tomlinson gave birth to her sixth son and last child. Caught in the patriotic fever, they named him Robert Edward Lee, after the hero of the Mexican-American War, who had recently taken command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.8 A few months later, Jim traveled back to Alabama and began supplying Confederate troops with corn and beef and renting the Evergreen Plantation’s grazing pasture for Confederate army livestock.9
While almost every planter publicly supported the rebel cause, many still had reservations. Churchill shared his doubts one evening with two Unionist state judges, J. W. Bell and a man named Wheaton, who stopped at the Falls Plantation for dinner and spent the night. Churchill said he “was entirely opposed to the secession policy of the south.”10 Nevertheless, all of Churchill’s property was in Texas and Alabama, and he was not about to walk away from it, or the fortune he had invested in slaves. Churchill also began selling supplies to Texas army units, and he even delivered a wagon train of food and clothing to troops serving in Arkansas.11
In the late summer of 1861, the newly elected governor, Francis Lubbock, rode to Richmond, Virginia, to visit his friend Jefferson Davis, who had become the Confederacy’s president. Lubbock arrived just after the First Battle of Bull Run. The rebels had routed the Northern troops, sending them in full retreat to Washington, D.C., with 2,896 casualties and losses. The Confederates’ wounded, dead, and missing totaled 1,982 in a single day.12 No American had ever witnessed death on such a scale, but commanders knew the Battle of Bull Run was just the beginning of something new: industrialized warfare.
Davis asked Lubbock to raise eight thousand Texans to join the Confederate army. Lubbock knew that wouldn’t be enough, and he promised to raise more. While no one will ever know for sure, it’s estimated that more than half of white Texan men between the ages of sixteen and sixty eventually served in the war.13
DEFENDING THE COAST
In December 1861, Sarah Tomlinson’s sister Mary Travis died on Tomlinson Hill at the age of forty-five. Jim probated her will and requested permission to sell her meager belongings, except for the slaves. The list of her estate that Jim submitted to the probate court in February 1862 still exists in the Falls County Court House in Marlin. Her most valuable possessions were “one negro boy named Frank, $1000 and one negro woman named Betsey, $600.” Appraisers valued the balance of her personal property at $46.30.14 According to the 1860 census, Mary’s four youngest children, ages ranging from thirteen to nineteen, were living with the Tomlinsons. The eldest daughter, also named Mary, cared for her younger sister and two brothers until she married in 1867, and then she took them with her to her new home.
Susan Tomlinson Jones died from fever in 1862 at the age of fifty-one. The loss struck both Jim and Churchill hard. Susan had been the first Tomlinson to move to Texas, and she was the first buried in its soil.15
In the early years of the Civil War, some units took their names from their commanders and only later received a numerical designation. The smallest unit was a company, then came a battalion, and then a regiment. Most companies and battalions remained parts of their original regiments, which numbered no more than twelve hundred men. A regiment would join or leave a division or brigade as ordered by a commanding general.
In January 1862, Maj. J. W. Speight and Maj. J. E. Harrison recruited volunteers in Marlin and Waco to join what they named Speight’s Battalion. The infantry unit was based in Galveston at the time, part of the coastal defense.16
Will Tomlinson, Jim’s second eldest boy, at seventeen, was the first of the western Falls County men to volunteer. He rode his horse eighteen miles to Waco on January 15, where Harrison swore him in as one of the first enlistees and sent him home to await orders. James Jones, Churchill’s eldest son, joined the same unit twelve days later. James Eldridge Tomlinson, Jim’s eldest son, suffered from poor eyesight and couldn’t serve in the infantry, so in February he enlisted in Company K of the First Texas Heavy Artillery, also at Galveston.17
Most Texans joined cavalry units, reflecting the state’s tradition of horsemanship. Few volunteers wanted to man artillery around Galveston, a posting that meant spending humid summers on a string of barrier islands endemic with malaria and yellow fever. Galveston was the largest city in Texas, but illness was a constant threat.18
Some volunteers didn’t get a choice of assignment after artillerymen spotted Union battleships off of Galveston’s coast.19 Volunteers showing up for infantry duty in April 1862 saw their units redesignated as Companies A, I, and K of the First Texas Artillery. Will, James Eldridge, and James Jones found themselves all headed for Galveston.20
The Union ships formed a blockade, but made no immediate move to come ashore. Thirty-two-year-old James wrote to Churchill about the boredom:
There is too little excitement and too little to do. I have wished many times I was in more active service. I am aware, too, of the greater hardships attendant upon it, nevertheless in the end it would be more satisfactory if not in the actual performance of such service.
I have thought seriously several times of changing into Cavalry, but am afraid to risk a chance of officers and companions. I am certainly weary of soldiering. Tis the worst problem of my life by far. The dream of a short and active campaign under which I enlisted has vanished, and I can only brood over the present home existence as being lengthened out and the uncertainty of the future. Yet I would have been almost miserable had I never taken part in the great struggle.21
Wealthy planters took personal slaves with them, and commanders required planters to supply slave labor for the war effort. Commanders knew they needed strong defenses to protect Galveston,
and combat engineers recommended earthen defenses made from mounds of rock and earth, combined with trenches. James Jones guessed almost a quarter of the blacks in Falls County were needed:
I understand Judge Calvert and Major Hannah are empowered to press one-fourth of the negro fellows of Falls County in place of some to be released here. If such is done, a good and attentive overseer ought to be sent with them as a great many of them die here, and mainly for want of good attention. It is true the season is healthier now than it was, but deaths are yet occurring. The negroes, after staying here awhile, get very homesick, and if they have a chance to get on mainland, runaway [sic] and go home, at which their owners are always pleased.22
Union troops in April 1862 captured New Orleans, the Confederacy’s most important port, and they cut off coastal ship traffic between Texas and the rest of the South. The land crossing at Vicksburg became the only reliable connection. In addition, New Orleans provided Union troops a foothold to fight northward along the Mississippi to Vicksburg.
The Confederacy wanted to press tens of thousands of slaves into service to help maintain the system that kept them in chains, but planters did not readily heed the call. They may have wanted to maintain slavery, but keeping their slaves alive was more important. As early as April 1862, General W. R. Scurry issued a desperate appeal in Houston’s Tri-Weekly Telegraph:
Galveston is comparatively defenseless. In a short time, with negroes to work on the fortifications, the Island can be made impregnable, and the state saved from the polluting tread of armed abolitionists.
I therefore call upon the planters of the above counties to send at once one-fourth of their male negro population, of the ages between 16 and 50 years, with spades and shovels, to report at Galveston, to Col. V[alery] Sulakowski, Chief Engineer.
They must bring with them their bedding and cooking utensils.
Clothing and shoes will be furnished them at cost prices. Comfortable quarters [will be] provided for them. Medical attendance, medicines and rations furnished free, and thirty dollars per month will be paid [to their owners] for their services.
Overseers with 25 negroes will be paid $60 per month. Transportation to the Island and back home furnished free.23
Sulakowski, the Polish chief military engineer in Galveston, described in an April 1863 report why he needed more slave labor:
The force of negroes on the island consists of 481 effective men. Of these, 40 are at the saw mills, 100 cutting and carrying sod (as all the works are of sand, consequently the sodding must be done all over the works), 40 carrying timber, which leaves 301 on the works, including obstructions. The whole force of negroes consists, as above, of 481 effective, 42 cooks, 78 sick: Total 601.
In order to complete the defenses of Galveston it will require the labor of 1,000 negroes during three weeks, or eight weeks with the present force. The work of soldiers amounts to very little, as the officers seem to have no control whatever over their men. The number of soldiers at work is about 100 men, whose work amount to 10 negroes’ work.24
I feel certain Tomlinson Hill slaves were forced to serve the Confederate cause, but it’s difficult to know where they worked, or for whom. Jim Tomlinson might have sent the slave Milo, who, at age thirty-five, could have provided skilled labor. Milo’s seven-year-old son, Peter, could have served as a personal servant. They might even have seen combat.
The artillerymen in Galveston got a taste of battle on May 15, 1862, when the federal schooner Sam Houston shelled their positions for two days, until the Union commander demanded the city’s surrender. But the federal ships did not have enough troops to capture the island and sailed out of the bay when the rebels called their bluff.25
The Confederate Congress approved a law in April 1862 allowing for the conscription of any white male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. The law exempted slave overseers, government officials, and clergymen. The law allowed the conscription of state militiamen into the regular army to help states meet their enlistment quotas. Texas discharged Will from the artillery in July and sent him to Col. Tom Green’s Fifth Texas Cavalry Regiment. Green had led cavalry during the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War, and his reputation for courage reached across the state. His men called him “Daddy” Green.
Will met up with the Fifth Cavalry’s Company B in the summer of 1862, when Green sent his men home to rest and reequip following a tough campaign in New Mexico. Will joined a group of combat-proven men who had tasted victory, only to see it stolen away by poor logistical planning. Confederate commanders considered the Fifth Cavalry one of the top units west of the Mississippi.26
THE INVASION OF GALVESTON
In the fall of 1862, three Union ships attacked Fort Sabine, a post overlooking the mouth of the Sabine River on the Louisiana border. The retreating Texas artillery troops destroyed their fort, burned a railway bridge to slow the Union troops, and retreated along the coast to Galveston, sixty miles to the west, the next Union target.27
James Tomlinson’s Company K held an artillery position called “the Strand” on the beach just outside of town. James fell ill and was sent home on furlough from July 15 until at least September. A soldier’s family could provide better care than the army.28
Gen. Paul Octave Hébert, a flamboyant West Point graduate known for his extravagant uniforms and rat-tail mustache, served as the senior Confederate commander in Texas in 1861 and 1862 and brought with him a reputation for arrogance. In Galveston, he felt insufficiently manned or equipped to defend the Texas coastline, the second longest in the nation. Once he looked at the Union flotilla’s location and inspected his troops hobbled by yellow fever, he ordered a retreat across the bay and left the island to the Union. He assigned the First Artillery to move all but one of their heavy cannons across the one-and-a-half-mile rail trestle to Virginia Point on the mainland.
Almost as quickly as the rebels evacuated the artillery, the Union gunboat Harriet Lane steamed into Galveston Bay. The men at Fort Point, the only battery still equipped with a cannon, fired a single warning shot. The Union warship Owasco returned fire and destroyed their fighting position. The commander of the Union flotilla, William B. Renshaw, demanded the immediate surrender of Galveston, but he acquiesced to a four-day truce for civilians to evacuate. On October 8, 150 marines landed and found several hundred civilian men and two thousand women and children too poor or sick to leave the island.29
Hébert concentrated several hundred Confederate infantrymen and artillerymen at Fort Hébert to keep Union troops from crossing to the mainland. Their only position on the island was a small post at the railroad bridgehead. With Texas forces blocking all goods from crossing the railroad trestle, Renshaw found himself struggling to feed his troops and the 2,100 civilians isolated on the island.30
The Union marines in Galveston stationed themselves at the end of Eighteenth Street, on Kuhn’s Wharf. Renshaw ordered his flotilla of seven ships to anchor in the bay to provide cover for the troops. He also warned his troops to be ready to leave Galveston in a hurry because he had nowhere near enough marines ashore.31
Renshaw and Hébert reached an understanding, whereby Hébert’s men would control the bridge, with a small number posted on the island. The Union gunboats sat anchored within range of the bridge, ready to destroy it should the rebels try to mount a counterattack. But that also placed the Harriet Lane within range of Confederate guns at Virginia Point. Since neither side wanted to take down the cedar bridge, which would be useful later, a truce was struck.32
The Confederate high command, though, was scandalized at losing Galveston with only one shot fired and relieved Hébert of command. They appointed Maj. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder, a combat veteran, whom Texas fighters called “Prince John,” and he immediately began planning to retake the island.
Magruder ordered Green’s Fifth Cavalry to move to Virginia Point and wanted the only battle-tested troops in Texas to lead an amphibious assault with artillery supporting them.33 Texas troops
converted two river steamers, the Bayou City and the Neptune, into gunboats by mounting cannons and howitzers. Magruder’s plan called for volunteers from the First Texas Artillery to fire the heavy guns at the troops ashore while the cavalrymen boarded the Union ships.34
For James Tomlinson, who had poor eyesight, the artillery was a suitable place to serve. James couldn’t make out the enemy looking down the barrel of a rifle, or spot them at a distance in a cavalry charge, but he could load and fire a cannon. A typical artillery team consisted of at least six men per gun in order to fire as quickly as possible. Only the team leader aiming the cannon needed to see at a distance.35
Troops stacked cotton bales three-high on the decks of the Bayou City and the Neptune to absorb enemy fire and protect the artillery teams and the three hundred sharpshooters from the Fifth Cavalry. They also mounted oversized gangplanks on the upper decks to board the Union gunboats. Magruder ordered two tenders, the John F. Carr and the Lucy Gwinn, to carry follow-on troops.36
The plan called for three thousand Confederate troops to overwhelm the much smaller Union force of 150 marines. The Union, though, had superior firepower, with six gunboats carrying twenty-nine naval artillery pieces.37 The attack became even more risky when 264 infantrymen from the Forty-second Infantry Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, arrived from New Orleans on Christmas Day. The fresh troops took over a church and used the steeple as a lookout. The rebels needed to act fast before more Union reinforcements arrived. Unbeknownst to the Texans, another seven hundred Massachusetts Volunteers departed New Orleans on December 29 aboard the slow-moving Cumbria and Honduras for the three-day trip to Galveston. The Second Vermont Infantry Regiment was also en route with a shipment of one thousand rifles to arm Texas Unionists.38
Tomlinson Hill Page 7