Coming Fury, Volume 1 (38 page)

Twiggs was seventy, Georgia-born, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War; tall, red-faced, with heavy white hair and an ear-to-ear beard, possessor of a sword with jeweled hilt and golden scabbard voted him by Congress for gallantry in action.
Twiggs was on the side of the South and he made no bones about it, and he had been trying for many weeks to get a clear set of policy instructions from the War Department. In this effort he had had no more luck than Major Anderson had had, in faraway Fort Sumter, but he lacked Anderson’s uncompromising sense of duty, and when armed Southerners invited him to give up, he obeyed without demur. In Twiggs’s behalf it must be said that he had done his best to give Washington fair warning.

Early in December he had told the War Department that Texas would unquestionably secede before the winter ended, and he asked: “What is to be done with the public property in charge of the Army?” He got no reply, except for a vague statement that the administration had confidence that his “discretion, firmness and patriotism” would stand the test. He twice repeated his request for instructions, remarking early in January that “the crisis is fast approaching and ought to be looked in the face,” and on January 15 he wrote to Winfield Scott formally asking to be relieved from duty. On January 28 this request was granted, and orders were issued removing Twiggs from command of the Department of Texas and instructing him to turn the command over to Colonel Carlos A. Waite, of the 1st U. S. Infantry. The War Department, however, was in no mood to be precipitate, and instead of telegraphing these orders, it simply mailed them. Neither Twiggs nor anyone else in Texas knew that he had been relieved, and late in January, Twiggs bluntly told Washington that since he did not think that anyone wanted him to “carry on a civil war against Texas” he would, once the state seceded, surrender government property to the state authorities if the state authorities asked him to do so. He pointed out that he had asked four times for instructions without getting any answer.
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The orders relieving Twiggs and appointing Waite finally reached San Antonio on February 15. Waite unfortunately was sixty miles away, at Camp Verde, and Twiggs was conferring with certain commissioners from the state of Texas about the Federal government’s arms and military installations under his control. The situation was fluid, not to say confusing. A state convention on February 1 had voted Texas out of the Union, but the action was subject to ratification by a vote of the people in a referendum to
be held on February 23. Technically, if anyone wanted to make a point of it, Texas was still in the Union, and there was at least a chance that the electorate would not ratify the act of secession. (It was not a very bright chance, and it would turn extremely dull if, by election day, the Federal government’s top military man in Texas had surrendered.) On the night of February 15—on muleback and on horseback and on foot, devoid of uniforms but armed and waving the Lone Star flag—Texas state troops began marching into San Antonio, converging on the plaza, orderly but determined; their commander was Colonel Ben McCulloch, a redoubtable frontiersman who had been friend and neighbor to Davy Crockett and who had fought brilliantly in the Mexican War. By morning of February 16 a thousand of these troops were in town, ready to underline the state commissioners’ demands on Twiggs. The meeting with the commissioners was abruptly broken off. Twiggs surveyed the situation, found armed Texans surrounding government installations, then with his staff went back into conference with the commissioners, who demanded that he give up all military posts and public property forthwith.

Twiggs made only a token resistance. He had been given no instructions, he was heart and soul with the South, to reject the demand would have meant bloody fighting in the streets of San Antonio, and in any case he was seventy and in poor health, not ideally fitted to become a martyr for a cause in which he did not believe. By the middle of the day he gave up, signing an agreement under which his troops would collect their weapons, clothing, and camp equipment and march out of Texas unharmed. Orders were prepared and sent out along the 1200-mile line where the army’s frontier posts and forts were scattered—there were more than 2600 Federal soldiers in Texas, dispersed in small detachments all along the frontier—and the troops in San Antonio got under way at once, moving out of their quarters with flag flying and band playing, to make their first camp that evening on the edge of town. San Antonio contained a number of Unionists, who watched the little procession in impotent indignation, but most of the people were enthusiastic secessionists.
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In the midst of all of this excitement the ambulance containing Colonel Lee came into town and pulled up in front of the Read
House, where Lee was to stop. As Lee got out of the wagon he noticed that the street was full of armed men, some of them wearing strips of red flannel on their shoulders to show that they were officers. A friend met him, the Unionist-minded Mrs. Caroline Darrow, whose husband was a clerk in army department headquarters. Lee asked her who these men might be.

“They are McCulloch’s,” she said. “General Twiggs surrendered everything to the state this morning and we are all prisoners of war.” Lee stared at her, and she wrote afterwards that his lips trembled and his eyes filled with tears as he exclaimed: “Has it come so soon as this?”

Lee’s position was embarrassing. If Mrs. Darrow’s story was right, he himself might at this moment be some sort of prisoner, although technically, since he had been detached from his command and ordered to Washington, he was no longer on duty in Texas, and hence should not be included in any list of officers who had been surrendered. He entered the hotel, changed his uniform for unobtrusive civilian clothing, and went to department headquarters. There he found that the story was all too true. The state of Texas was in control, and its representatives intimated that Lee might not be given transportation to get out of Texas unless he immediately resigned his commission and joined the Confederacy. This proposal he instantly rejected. He was an officer in the army, his orders were to report in Washington, and those orders he would obey—and, on consideration, the Texans decided not to try to stop him.

 … A fascinating “if” develops at this point. A few months earlier, in Twiggs’s absence, Lee had been acting commander of the Department of Texas. If the secession crisis had come to a head then, or if Twiggs’s return had been delayed past mid-winter, it would have been Lee and not Twiggs on whom the Texas commissioners would have made their demand for the surrender of government property. Without any question, Lee would have given them a flat refusal—in which case it might easily have been Lee, and not Major Robert Anderson, who first received and returned the fire of the secessionists, with San Antonio, rather than Fort Sumter, as the scene of the fight that began a great war. Subsequent history could have been substantially different.

However, it did not happen that way. Lee made his arrangements for transportation to the coast, where he could get passage for the East, storing his goods with a friend until they could conveniently be shipped. He was withdrawn and reserved in manner during these final days in San Antonio, and an army friend who talked with him at this time wrote that he had “seldom seen a more distressed man.” To this friend Lee remarked: “When I get to Virginia I think the world will have one soldier less. I shall resign and go to planting corn.” To another friend, he said frankly that nothing that happened in Texas could swerve him from the path of duty, but that he believed his loyalty to Virginia ought to come ahead of his loyalty to the Federal government. He would make this clear, he said, to General Scott, and in the end he would do what Virginia did. If Virginia stayed in the Union, so would he; if Virginia went out, he would follow her, “with my sword, and if need be, with my life.”
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He got to the coast, at last, on February 22, took a steamer to New Orleans, and reached his home at Arlington on March 1.

In Texas, meanwhile, secession became complete and final. Colonel Waite reached San Antonio on February 19, to take over the command of a department that no longer existed. The city was full of armed men, not all of them under complete control; there was a good deal of excited firing at nothing in the streets, and Northern men were making hasty arrangements to get their families and themselves out of the state. Everything the government owned in San Antonio was in the hands of the Texas authorities, and some of the army’s outlying posts appeared to be in danger of attack by enthusiastic levies of citizen-soldiers. Colonel Waite, a Northerner with Northern instincts, found there was nothing he could do but accept the accomplished fact.

“No one at a distance can form a correct idea of the state of public feeling,” he wrote. “The troops in this department are stationed at different camps or posts in small garrisons, and spread over a very large extent of country. To concentrate a sufficient number to make a successful resistance, after the Texans had taken the field, was not practicable.… An attempt to bring them together under these circumstances would have, no doubt, resulted in their being cut up in detail before they could get out of the country.
Under these circumstances I felt it my duty to comply with the agreement entered into by General Twiggs and remove the troops from the country as early as possible.”
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At some of the remote camps there was infinite confusion. The situation at Camp Cooper was typical. The probability that Twiggs would do whatever Texas asked him to do was recognized, even in advance of the surrender, and Captain S. D. Carpenter, of the 1st U. S. Infantry, commanding at Camp Cooper, warned his men on February 16 that the place would very likely be attacked “by the identical persons whose lives and property the Government have sent us here to defend.” In such case, he said, the garrison must defend itself to the death: “In a strife like this we have but one course to pursue, for each would rather lay his corpse to molder upon the plain he defends than to drag it hence to be the laugh and scorn of every honest lover of his country’s glory.” Three days later, however, Captain Carpenter found himself obliged to eat his brave words, and to the officer in command of the surrounding Texas troops he sent a message of submission. Guided by “a spirit of patriotism and loyalty to the Union, and by what I conceive to be the counsels of the most enlightened of statesmen of the nation, and also by what I understand to be the policy of the general commanding the department, after due consultation with the officers of my command, I have determined to surrender this camp to the State of Texas.”
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In a sense all of this turmoil was unnecessary, because the War Department was not looking for a fight in Texas any more than General Twiggs was looking for one, and nothing but the bureaucratic habit of trusting to the mails and letting time take care of itself kept this from being known to everybody involved. On February 15, before McCulloch’s warriors had come trooping into San Antonio, the War Department drafted instructions for Colonel Waite, who would become Twiggs’s successor as soon as he could reach San Antonio. If Texas should secede (said these instructions), Waite must as quickly as possible “put in march for Fort Leavenworth, the entire military force of your department.” He was to use all army means of transportation, including camels—among the items of government property in Texas were several dozens of these beasts, imported by Jefferson Davis when he was
Secretary of War as likely burden-bearers on the arid plains of the West—and any property that had to be left behind was to be turned over to selected quartermasters, who would have the stuff sent on to New York by steamer at the earliest opportunity. The only trouble was that it seems to have occurred to nobody in Washington to send these orders by wire. If Twiggs had received them by February 16, as he might have done, he would have had at last the clear guidance that had been denied him, and everybody concerned would have been spared a good deal of mental anguish. But the orders were sent along by mail, and they did not reach San Antonio until March 1, when they meant nothing to anyone.

The scattered army detachments were on their way by this time. The state of Texas turned over twenty-six teams and wagons (transportation it probably had acquired by means of the Twiggs agreement) to help the movement along, and by the end of the month most of the men were on their way to the coast. Not all of Texas thought that the troops should be allowed to leave. The Federal commander at Camp Mason, which Colonel Lee had left just in time, got a curt note from the commander of a contingent of Texas Rangers, who told him bluntly: “I think the commissioners on the part of the State of Texas are a set of jackasses in allowing the regular troops in leaving Texas with their arms; and, to be plain with you, if I had a sufficient force I would make all of you lay down your arms in short order, and if I can get men I will yet do it.” Most of the troops finally made their way outside of the state, but more than 800 of them, including Colonel Waite, were captured and held as prisoners, to be released on parole a bit later. A San Antonio newspaper estimated that the army property seized was worth $1,209,500, not counting public buildings.
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