Texas in the American Civil War

• 1. February, 1861

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  Texas voted itself out of the United States on the 1st of February 1861. Seventy votes for secession were recorded before a single delegate said no. The final count reached 166 to 7. Among the dissenters was James Webb Throckmorton of Collin County. When the galleries hissed and jeered his vote, Throckmorton answered: "When the rabble hiss, well may patriots tremble." The crowd gave him a grudging round of applause.

  Outside the hall, the man who had worked for months to prevent this outcome was already losing power. Governor Sam Houston had refused to call the Legislature into special session and had warned the state that secession would end in Southern defeat. He was proved irrelevant by the speed of events. Texas joined the Confederacy on the 2nd of March 1861. That date had been chosen deliberately: it fell on the anniversary of Texas independence. It was also Sam Houston's birthday.

  The state that voted to leave the Union held a population of 604,215, of whom 182,566 were enslaved. Between 70,000 and 90,000 Texans would go on to serve in Confederate forces. They fought in every theater of the war, from the New Mexico territory to the eastern seaboard. No major battle would be fought on Texas soil. The war's final battle, however, would be.

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• 2. Sam Houston's Last Stand

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  "Let me tell you what is coming," Sam Houston warned as the secession crisis took hold. Houston was a slaveholder who deplored Lincoln's election. But he called secession a "rash action" that would favor the industrialized, more populous North. He predicted the Union would advance with "the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche." He foresaw the loss of "countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives."

  Houston opposed the convention itself, arguing it had overstepped its authority by tying Texas to the new Confederacy. He refused at first to call the Legislature into special session. When citizens made clear they would act without him, he relented, but urged the body to declare the convention illegal. He also pressed for Texas to revert to its former status as an independent republic and remain neutral. None of these efforts succeeded.

  On the 16th of March 1861, state officials gathered to swear loyalty to the Confederacy. Houston arrived and took his seat. His name was called three times. He gave no answer. The governor's office was declared vacant. He had prepared a speech for the occasion but never read it aloud. In it, he refused the oath in the name of "the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by the Convention." After his removal, he withdrew from public life. In June 1861, he wrote to a friend that he was now "a conservative citizen of the Southern Confederacy." He died in July 1863.

  Francis Lubbock beat Edward Clark by just 124 votes to become governor in 1861. Lubbock pushed aggressively to draft all able-bodied men into Confederate service, including resident aliens.

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• 3. The Price of Dissent

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  In August 1862, Confederate soldiers under Lieutenant Colin D. McRae tracked a group of German Texans to a bend in the Nueces River. The group was trying to flee the state rather than serve in the Confederate Army. Capt. James Duff, Confederate provost marshal for the Hill Country, had already executed two Unionists, prompting the flight. A pitched battle left two Confederates dead and eighteen of McRae's men wounded. Approximately 19 Unionists died in the fighting. Nine to eleven of the wounded survivors were shot in the head. Nine more were pursued and executed in the weeks that followed. Among those killed were two sons of Edward Degener, who would later serve as a Republican congressman. The German community around Austin County, led by Paul Machemehl, eventually made it to Mexico.

  In October 1862, roughly 150 settlers in and around Cooke County were arrested. The 11th Texas Cavalry Regiment carried out the arrests on orders from Confederate Provost Marshal James Bourland. The detained were accused of plotting to seize arsenals and cooperate with Union forces advancing from Arkansas. A court convened in Gainesville. Several men were hanged in what is now downtown Gainesville during the first week of October. Nineteen more were found guilty and hanged before the month ended. In total, roughly forty Unionists were hanged at Gainesville. Two were shot while trying to escape. Two others were turned over to a military tribunal and hanged. A granite monument now marks the site.

  The Confederate conscription act, passed in Richmond in 1862, drove much of this violence. All men between 18 and 45 were required to serve. Men who owned fifteen or more slaves were exempt. Draft resistance was strongest among Texans of German and Mexican descent, many of the latter crossing into Mexico. At least 2,000 Texans chose to join the Union Army rather than the Confederate one. Edmund J. Davis was among them. He commanded the Union Army's 1st Texas Cavalry Regiment and rose to the rank of brigadier general. That rank would later carry him to the Texas governorship.

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• 4. Texas at War

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  "Texans! The troops of other states have their reputations to gain, but the sons of the defenders of the Alamo have theirs to maintain," Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared when the first Texas companies arrived in Richmond, Virginia. Texas furnished the Confederacy with 45 regiments of cavalry and 23 regiments of infantry. It also supplied 12 cavalry battalions, 4 infantry battalions, 5 regiments of heavy artillery, and 30 batteries of light artillery. The state paid for additional frontier-defense troops from its own treasury. Some of the men in these units were veterans of the Mexican-American War; a few had served in the earlier Texas Revolution.

  The Texas Brigade, also known as Hood's Brigade, was built around the 1st, 4th, and 5th Texas Infantry Regiments. It functioned as shock troops for General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee called its members "my Texans" and said more than once that none had brought greater honor to their home state. At Antietam, the brigade faced Wisconsin's Iron Brigade. At Gettysburg, it assaulted Houck's Ridge and then Little Round Top.

  Walker's Greyhound Division was formed in 1862 under Major General John George Walker. It was the only Confederate division to maintain a single-state composition throughout the entire war. It fought in the Western Theater and the Trans-Mississippi Department. A fourth brigade, detached in 1863, was isolated and forced to surrender at the Battle of Arkansas Post. Among the mounted units, Terry's Texas Rangers drew from former rangers and frontiersmen. The 33rd Texas Cavalry Regiment, under Colonel Santos Benavides, protected Confederate cotton routes into northern Mexico. Benavides was the highest-ranking Tejano officer in the Confederate military. Their most dramatic test at home came on the 8th of September 1863. A small garrison on the Sabine River, held by just 46 men, was about to face an invasion force many times its size.

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• 5. Holding the Coast

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  On the 1st of January 1863, Confederate General John B. Magruder's troops recaptured Galveston from a Union garrison. Federal forces had occupied the city for three months under the Union's Anaconda Plan, which blockaded the entire Gulf coast. With Magruder's victory, Galveston remained in Confederate hands until the war's end. A few days after the recapture, the CSS Alabama attacked and sank the USS Hatteras off the Galveston coast.

  The most celebrated Confederate stand in Texas came on the 8th of September 1863, at the Second Battle of Sabine Pass. Forty-six soldiers from the mostly-Irish Davis Guards held the position under Lieutenant Richard W. Dowling of the 1st Texas Heavy Artillery. Opposing them was a Union force from New Orleans under General William B. Franklin: 4,000 men on 27 ships. Dowling's gunners disabled the lead vessels. The fleet retreated to New Orleans. Jefferson Davis called the victory "perhaps the greatest military victory in the history of the world." The Confederate Congress passed a special resolution of recognition and created the Davis Guards Medal, the only military decoration awarded by the Confederacy during the war.

  Ports along the Rio Grande, including Brownsville and Matamoros, had become the primary exit points for Southern cotton. Civilian runners routed shipments through the Mexican port of Bagdad to reach European and other markets. President Lincoln wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in 1863 that "no local object is now more desirable" than disrupting that trade. General Nathaniel P. Banks led the Rio Grande Expedition to seize the ports near Brownsville and push 100 miles inland. Brownsville fell briefly, but the cotton trade continued. By the war's end, only Brazos Island and El Paso remained in Union hands. The Confederate army holding the rest of Texas was already falling apart.

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• 6. A State Unravels

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  General Edmund Kirby Smith commanded more than 60,000 Confederate soldiers in Texas as the war entered its final spring. Garrisoned far from the main fronts, they had grown increasingly demoralized; desertion and thievery had become common long before the major surrenders. News of Lee's surrender at Appomattox on the 9th of April 1865 reached Texas around April 20. Still, the war was not quite over. On the 12th of May 1865, Union forces from Brazos Island engaged Confederate troops at Palmito Ranch. It was the final battle of the Civil War, fought more than a month after Lee had laid down his arms.

  On May 14, troops in Galveston briefly mutinied before being persuaded to stay under arms. Generals Magruder and Kirby Smith had already been discussing surrender terms with Union officers as early as May 9. They shifted from rallying their men to distributing Confederate property before it could be seized. Desertions continued to accelerate.

  Soldiers began pillaging Galveston's quartermaster stores on May 21. A mob demanded a government warehouse be opened, and troops sent to restore order joined the looting. Several hundred civilians sacked the blockade runner Lark when it docked on May 24. In Houston on May 23, residents ransacked the ordnance building and the clothing bureau. Riots continued in Houston through May 26. Stores were looted in Tyler, Marshall, Huntsville, Gonzales, Hempstead, La Grange, and Brownsville. In Navasota, a powder explosion killed eight people and leveled twenty buildings. In Austin, $17,000 in gold was stolen from the State Treasury.

  By May 27, half of the original Confederate forces in Texas had deserted or disbanded. Kirby Smith formally surrendered on June 2. He condemned those who had fled for leaving him to command no one. Federal troops would not arrive to restore order for more than two additional weeks.

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• 7. Return and Reckoning

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  Gordon Granger arrived on Galveston Island with 2,000 Union soldiers on the 19th of June 1865. He carried the announcement that the enslaved people of Texas were free. The Texas holiday Juneteenth commemorates that date. Two days earlier, President Andrew Johnson had named Andrew J. Hamilton as provisional governor. Hamilton had served as Abraham Lincoln's appointed Military Governor of Texas throughout the war. His new task was to bring Texas back into the Union on terms Congress would accept.

  Hamilton called a constitutional convention and required delegates to swear an oath of amnesty. The result was the Constitution of 1866. It nullified the secession ordinance, ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, and repudiated Confederate debts. But delegates refused to grant Black Texans the right to vote. They would not ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They refused even to declare that secession had been invalid from the start. Congressional Republicans found all of this unacceptable.

  The Constitution of 1869, produced by a second convention, extended the vote to all men over 21 regardless of race. Edmund J. Davis, the convention's president, tried to adjourn before a final vote could be held. He was physically blocked from leaving the hall. General Edward Canby's forces retrieved the document and formed a committee to finalize it. Only forty-five of the ninety-four delegates signed it, and Davis was compelled by Canby to add his own signature. Texas ratified all three Reconstruction Amendments. On the 30th of March 1870, Congress permitted Texas representatives to take their seats.

  By 1870, Texas held a population of 818,579, including roughly 250,000 freemen. Cattle became the dominant industry, driven northward along routes such as the Chisholm Trail. Black Texans were active in state politics during Reconstruction but were eventually disenfranchised after it ended. The state still observes Confederate Heroes Day as an official holiday. Houston's oldest city park, Sam Houston Park, displayed a bronze monument titled Spirit of the Confederacy, sculpted by Louis Amateis in 1908. On the 11th of June 2020, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner announced its removal. It was relocated to the Houston Museum of African American Culture on the 17th of June 2020.

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