Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
In Texas, Frank Lubbock beat the drums of patriotism and alarm. He issued a proclamation urging "every able-bodied Texan" to enlist. He had received official calls for only 8,000 men from the Confederacy, but he recruited many thousands more. He anticipated the call for companies to serve in the East, and was more than prepared for it when it inevitably arrived.
There was a tremendous "tradition" in Texas, as Rupert Richardson observed, that young men should join the colors in any crisis. When the flag was raised and rallies held in every scattered, dusty town, the response, by any historical standard, was phenomenal. Richmond asked for twenty companies of infantry in the late summer of 1861, "for service in Virginia, the enlistment to be for the period of the war." Thirty-two companies answered the call. These men, drawn from dozens of distant counties, marched to Virginia, and into shot, shell, and legend, as Hood's Brigade. This was the Texan Brigade that broke the Federal lines at Gaines's Mill and was given the glorious, if dangerous, honor of first place in Longstreet's Corps. Some members survived to witness Appomattox.
The figures of the troops Texas gave the Confederacy cannot be completely reconciled; records of the time were poorly kept. The 1860 census showed there were 92,145 white men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in the state. Between 60,000 and 70,000 men saw service—two—thirds of the military-age population. Even though these figures, basically correct, include frontier service and many reenlistments, they can be reconciled in one way. Thousands of boys below eighteen, and thousands of men up to sixty and beyond, joined the Stars and Bars.
The one great contribution of Texas to the Southern cause was men. Tradition was both made and fulfilled, but at appalling human damage.
The leadership class in Texas was composed of planters and professional men; traditionally, these were more responsive to the bugle call than men from the countinghouse or factory. The great planters had feared secession, but they sustained the Southern army to the end. In each county, landowners raised unit after unit, many armed and equipped at their own expense. They filled most of the posts from captain to colonel, while the ranks were filled with tough farmboys thronging in. The rock of both armies, Blue and Gray, was this horde of small farmers. But evidence is incontrovertible that a higher percentage of the social and capitalist elite joined the colors in the South, while professional graduates of West Point commanded in every major battle on both sides.
Texas supplied 135 general officers and colonels to the South, including two professionals of superior talent, John B. Hood and Albert Sidney Johnston. Hood became a temporary full general in 1864, while Johnston's tragic death at Shiloh is believed by some historians to have markedly affected the outcome of the war. Only one native-born Texan became a Confederate general: Felix Huston Robertson. He was the last Confederate general officer to die.
Hundreds of medical doctors and lawyers enlisted or secured commissions. Doctors who drew the sword rather than the scalpel included Generals Richard Gano and Jerome Robertson, and Colonels John S. Ford and Ashbel Smith. Generals W. R. Scurry and A. W. Terrell and Colonels Hugh McLeod, John Marshall, and Roger Mills were fighting lawyers. Two high officers, Wilburn King and William Rogers, held degrees in both medicine and law. These men lent a certain blaze of glory to the Southern legions under the Bonny Blue Flag. Their blood, and the loss of this high-minded elite put a somber, lasting pall over the future of the land.
Scurry bled to death cheering his men on at Jenkin's Ferry in 1864. John Marshall, at the head of the 4th Texas, died from a minié ball at Gaines's Mill. Doctor William Rogers—"the bravest man who ever wore the gray"—fell riddled as he planted the St. Andrew's Cross on the Union parapet at Corinth, Mississippi, in 1862. The graves of the Texan educated elite lay scattered in a grim procession across six states.
Whatever their motivation, and whatever their faults, no group of men ever more bravely sustained a forlorn cause. They gave it a certain haunted holiness few Texans ever completely forgot.
Two-thirds of the Texan companies fought west of the Mississippi, in bitter, bloody battles that rarely gained recognition or national fame. Terry's Rangers were never excelled, in Union eyes, for reckless mobility and heroic dash. Two-thirds of Terry's men were killed, their bones scattered in a hundred sites. Ross's Brigade fought valiantly on both sides of the Mississippi. Here again the war took a hideous toll, not only of landowners but of ordinary men. Texas's loss in blood and bone was proportionally higher than that of any Northern state.
By 1864 the old units were ragged remnants. Companies of infantry could hardly muster a corporal's guard; battalions could barely surround their tattered battle flags. Proud of their tradition and honors, many older units refused new blood; no replacements were accepted. This was military idiocy, but as an example of cavalier magnificence it still stands.
Many of these units were still fighting, in 1865, when the population of the South, as a whole, had forsaken the war. As military historians know, and many Americans have overlooked, Lee at Petersburg was with an army sustaining a broken nation, and not the other way around.
The sustaining of the War Between the States in Texas was a magnificent achievement overall, by a completely agricultural, frontier society totally unequipped to fight a total war against an industrial power. Southerners, between 1861 and 1865, sacrificed more to a general war than any body of Americans before or since. The losses were enormous: 200,000 soldiers died, and a quarter of Texas's most vigorous manpower was killed or incapacitated. The entire economy gradually became paralyzed, due to the Federal naval blockade that tightened by the middle of 1861. And in the areas where the armies marched the destruction of property was total. Texas was spared this last, not by chance but by a vigorous defense of its soil in the latter months of the war.
The lack of manufactures and resources and industrial skills was more fatal in the long run than the disparity in numbers between North and South. Without a navy, the Confederacy fought from isolation against impossible odds. Even so, however, the South made the cost of restoring the Union almost too great for the Northern states to bear. Confederate determination, gallantry, and military brilliance on the battlefield forced the North to fight a war of attrition. This bled the Confederacy to death, as both Grant and Lincoln knew it would, but in the summer of 1864, while General Grant was presiding over the "unbroken Union funeral train" in the Wilderness, Union morale nearly crumbled. The peace party in the North was active, calling for negotiations or arbitration by outside nations—which would have meant tacitly giving up the South. Even in November, when the disintegration of the Confederacy was obvious, Lincoln won reelection by only 200,000 votes. Millions of Northerners did not think the war was worth the price: 300,000 Union dead. The American Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in modern history, in terms of populations and forces engaged.
With sufficient munitions and any kind of industrial machine, the South would have made Union victory unfeasible.
The Federal blockade forced an immediate economic revolution in Texas. Cotton continued to be grown, but it could be exported only with great difficulty. More acreage went to corn and other food crops. The departure of the men threw the burden of supplying food and clothing on women and slaves, and it also threw the plantations back on their own resources. The Texas cotton plantation was never a self-sufficient estate, like the Mexican
hacienda
. It was a capitalistic enterprise. The most progressive planters had long bought even their tools and slave clothing from the Northern factories.
Plantation families worked to spin cloth for uniforms; it was remarked that travelers could not approach any house without hearing the sound of wheels or looms. The big plantations and isolated settlements established shops to try to make such necessities as hoes, knives, and shirts, from scratch. Surprising progress was made in some areas. Through the efforts of a state board, 40,000 pairs of wool and cotton cards were secured from Europe and imported through Mexico. Texas was able to sell some $2,000,000 in cotton by hauling it to the Rio Grande during the war. This exchange was invaluable.
Wives and daughters could make uniforms at home, but other military needs proved more difficult. A cap and gun factory was built at Austin, the first in the state. A region where almost the entire population went armed had never thought of making its own weapons; the North could do it better. The Austin arsenal forged only a handful of cannon, all of doubtful quality. Meanwhile, though dozens of ambitious charters for various industrial projects were issued, all of these dreams fell through. Grandiose plans were discussed for all sorts of manufactures, but in Texas there was no infrastructure for industry. Skills, tools, and transportation were all lacking. Lawyers drew up charters; the legislature approved them; the factories were never built.
The penitentiary at Huntsville produced 1,500,000 yards of cloth each year with convict labor. Salt works were established in several parts of the state, since military stores required huge amounts of salt. New ironworks were erected near Jefferson, Rusk, and Austin, while officials struggled with the realization that dishes, cups, candles, knives, and spoons, which had always been so conveniently bought abroad, now had to be made at home. Actually, Texas publicly and privately made an impressive total of uniforms, hats, shoes, and produced an enormous amount of bacon and flour. Tragically, little of this total ever reached the hungry and ragged Confederate armies, because there were few roads and no rails.
The crops were fortunately good during the war years. No community really suffered from lack of food. Families lived on yams, used pipe ashes for soda, and drank burnt okra for a coffee substitute. No substitute for sugar—also cut off—was found. But a great pride was taken in this austerity, because it supported the war. A thousand irritations and minor disasters, such as the breakage or loss of irreplaceable items, were borne cheerfully. Clothing wore out, but now there were patriotic songs about "homespun dresses, like the Southern ladies wear."
One horror of the war years was the disappearance of medicines. The Union placed medical supplies, including all anesthetics, on the war contraband list. This was a hardheaded act of modern war, but few things caused more suffering and resentment in the South. Confederate hospitals, military and civilian, were tragic and hideous places late in the war.
The greatest burdens fell on the frontier women, who had to go into the fields with hoe and plow to raise food for their families. Farm work by women was not an American tradition. Women were used to grinding, endless labor, but field work often exceeded their strength and skill. That so much food was grown, and few families actually went hungry, can only be laid to the wartime burst of patriotic cooperation that suffused the majority. Thousands of soldiers left wives or children without adequate means of support. But as Oran R. Roberts observed, "An almost universal humane feeling inspired people of wealth as well as those in moderate circumstances to help the indigent families of soldiers in the field and the women who had lost husbands and sons by sickness or in battle."
The large plantations opened their granaries freely. Citizens surrendered their specie, and women donated jewelry to provide foreign exchange for blockade runners. Years of accumulated wealth, of all kinds, was willingly given up to the needs of war. Relief committees were active, collecting food, clothing, and money. In Houston alone, $3,000 per week was raised by private subscription by the start of 1863.
The government exacted tithes of produce, hogs, and various goods to supply the army. But by the third year of war there was a general realization of the widespread destitution of soldier families. In 1863, Texas appropriated $600,000 for direct relief of soldier families. By 1864, 74,000 women and minor children were on the state war relief rolls, showing again the enormous drain of manpower from the state. An agrarian society, committed beyond its powers, was beginning to exhibit unbearable strains.
An agricultural economy could put a large army in the field for a season or two. It was utterly incapable of sustaining a war of attrition that went on for years. The heroism with which it tried, and the valiant struggles that took place on a hundred thousand scattered Texas farms, must always remain a source of American pride.
One remarkable aspect of the war years was the behavior of the Negro slaves. Thousands of able-bodied men were left in charge of women, old men, and boys on the river bottoms. A region that had long been haunted by the specter of slave revolt—it was only months since the hysteria of 1859—did not record a single incident. As the chief justice of Texas stated: "It was a subject of general remark that the negroes were more docile and manageable during the war than at any other period, and for this they deserve the lasting gratitude of their owners in the army." The fact that the slaves labored mightily and peaceably through the war has never adequately been explained. But certainly more humane treatment helped, and many slaves seemed to have been genuinely caught up in a feeling for a plantation, land, and society in which they had no stake. There were innumerable cases where a white mistress directed the efforts of dozens of slaves, in isolated places. No white woman or child was ever molested, and even more remarkably, fewer slaves tried to run away than in the previous years.
While Governor Francis Lubbock worked devotedly to support the Confederate nation, certain significant strains and tensions between government and people, and between the state and Confederate regimes, soon developed. Although Lubbock urged every man into uniform, saw that laws were passed suspending debts for the duration, pushed through bonds and special local taxes, and authorized the receipt of Confederate paper to pay state obligations—all revolutionary acts in 19th-century America—there was still enormous ineptitude in certain places.