Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
One source of trouble was General Paul Octave Hébert, the commander of the Military Department of Texas. The appointment of Hébert to this post was unfortunate. The General was a West Pointer, but he had spent much time in Europe, and he affected continental military styles. He was arrogant, arbitrary, and cavalier; he also lacked common sense. Thomas North, in his
Five Years in Texas: Or What You Did Not Hear During the War
, described Hébert as a "constitutional ape." He "preferred red-top boots, a rat-tail moustache, fine equipage, and a suite of waiters. . . . He was too much of a military coxcomb to suit the ideas and ways of a pioneer country; besides, he was suspected of cowardice." Texans could have put up with his costumes and airs, probably, had Hébert spent less time meddling in state affairs and more time seeking the sound of the guns.
In November 1862, Hébert issued an order barring the export of cotton except under government control. On the surface this order made sense, except that the Confederate authorities were not equipped to implement it efficiently.
Since July 1861, the Texas coast had been under naval blockade. No cotton, the state's only resource, could be shipped to hungry European markets. But Mexico provided a loophole. Baled cotton was hauled south to the Rio Grande, delivered in Matamoros, and shipped from the Mexican side of the river in the thousands of British and French sails that congregated in the Gulf. Treaties had been negotiated with Mexican authorities in Matamoros to expedite this by the Confederate commander at Brownsville. A vast trade quickly built up; foreign ships by the hundreds lay off the mouth of the Rio Grande, while their captains clamored for cargoes and bid the price of cotton to enormous sums. The American war had caught British mills by surprise.
To protect this trade against a possible Yankee breach of the doctrine of freedom of the seas, the French and British governments sent strong squadrons to the Gulf. It was said in Texas that Admiral de Villeneuve's ships, not respect for legality, kept Federal patrol vessels far north of the Rio Grande.
The haul from the Colorado to the border was long, arduous, and expensive; there were only trails through the chaparral. But the brush country was white with falling cotton lint, because the fiber sold for a dollar, gold, per pound.
Although Texas received $2,000,000 from this export, and got back vital guns, medicines, and tools that could be gotten nowhere else, two things about this enterprise disturbed the Confederate authorities. One was that a great amount of this cotton ended up in Yankee mills—Northern manufacturers were just as desperate as the British, and sometimes, through agents, outbid them. The trade was all in the South's favor even so, but in some governmental minds it became contaminated.
The other objection was more valid. The trade was in private hands.
While the wagons returned from the Rio Grande with nails, medicines, Napoleon muskets, and Enfield rifles and Kerr revolvers, they also brought back sugar, coffee, wax candles, and a few French gowns. Merchants were merchants, and the profits on luxury items were immense. By 1862, even near-luxuries and things formerly considered necessities brought fabulous prices in Texas. Every civilized amenity had been cut off, but there were people in Texas who would pay any price for certain things, war or no war. Whenever a merchant arrived back from the Rio Grande actual riots were sometimes set off, with housewives clamoring for goods.
The pioneer Mary Maverick of San Antonio wrote in her journal that after a tiring battle, "wedged up and swaying for hours," she finally fought her way to a counter and purchased one bolt of domestic cloth, one pair of shoes, and one dozen wax candles for $180. The broker in question paid $60,000 in specie for this shipment, and he sold everything out in less than a week.
This diversion of resources to "nonessentials" understandably concerned the military. But Hébert's orders did not improve matters; it merely threw impossible bureaucratic bottlenecks into the process. The whole trade was halted, and here Hébert got himself into serious disfavor with important men.
Hébert was already hated because of other policies, especially his implementation of the Confederate conscription laws. He was relieved because of these pressures and replaced with General John Bankhead Magruder, fresh from the Peninsula campaign. Magruder was a "dashing and festive" soldier; he took personal command of certain military operations then proceeding at Galveston, and he was a leader better suited to Texas styles.
But Bankhead Magruder was equally unequipped to command the vital export trade. He issued supposedly helpful instructions that only made things worse. In April 1863, he disgustedly withdrew all controls, to see if this would help; but this move was intolerable to the Confederate commissioners and Congress. A law was enacted to regulate the trade, but which was again unworkable, and soon even the most patriotic merchants and agents were conspiring to get around the government.
The Confederacy thus never fully exploited the Mexican loophole. Too little cotton would have reached the border in any case without roads or rails, but soldiers and bureaucrats without logistic or business experience either stopped the trade or let more and more foreign exchange be lost to speculators and profiteers.
This logistical ineptitude colored the whole war and shadowed the genuine Southern battle gallantry. The lawyers and landed gentry who formed the Richmond government could write florid ballads to the valor of Southern manhood, while Southern manhood bled futilely away. They moved perceptibly away from the American federal system toward an aristocratic parliamentary regime, on the British model, but this did not face the Southern problem. The traditions and reality of a colonial-economy South did not prepare men to run a railroad, much less understand and manage a logistical complex.
Hood's Brigade charged cheering across wheat stubble in bare feet, while thousands of good leather shoes gathered dust in Confederate North Carolina. Ross's veterans fought with empty bellies, with five million range cattle roaming Texas. The premier soldiers of the South, such as Hood and Johnston, were splendid tacticians, with a greater gusto for their trade than their often-amateur counterparts from the North. But the industrially trained managers behind the Union far better understood the strategic shape of modern war. They raised, equipped, and prodigally maintained 2,000,000 bluecoats in the field; they outdid Napoleon, which few Continental observers—even with their hearts in the South—failed to see.
The South raised less than a million men, and could not feed these.
The basic loyalty of the bulk of Texans did not waver during the war. But patriotic rallies and real efforts could not hide the fact that after 1862 the conflict began to take an inevitable toll. The early euphoria vanished, as the Southwestern states were increasingly thrown on their own. The strategic brilliance of the Federal seizure of the Mississippi split Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas from the South; it not only stopped Texan food and clothing from reaching the fronts, but it caused consternation in the West. In June 1862, the governor of Arkansas stated that if the western states were to be left to their fate, the sooner they knew it the better. Although Lubbock cooperated fully with the Confederate authorities, held several meetings, and helped get a high-level Trans-Mississippi command, under General Edmund Kirby-Smith, approved, bitterness increased. A move grew in Texas, not to make peace with the Yankees but to secede from the Confederate States.
In early 1863, Governor Lubbock referred to "signs of a latent dissatisfaction . . . if not a positive disloyalty to the Confederacy." He worked to halt this. He called a special legislative session. He doubled taxes and began the first statewide soldiers' relief. These measures were more apparent than real. By this time, the internal and external credit of Texas was collapsing. The old recourse to unsecured currency went its usual way: Confederate scrip was only good so long as confidence in the Confederate government lasted. Now, Texas notes and warrants, backed by nothing but a promise to pay at some future date, depreciated into worthlessness. The state government maintained elaborate accounts, but stayed heavily in debt even in paper money terms. The accounts actually became meaningless: taxes were levied, and paid, in worthless bills. This financial and fiscal collapse did nothing to assist business and industry.
Inevitably, there was great speculation in real goods against soaring inflation. Few things caused more bitter complaint from the people at large, but the government was powerless to find a solution. The final misery was that war relief paid to widows and orphans was now paid in currency that could buy nothing.
The real cancer of internal disaffection, however, did not center around money but on the Confederate draft. By 1862, an incredible number of Texas men had volunteered for service; but Lee, in Virginia, faced a constant deficit in numbers. Lee's personal influence was instrumental in securing the passage of a Confederate conscription law. The concept, though this has been obscured by the enormous Southern war effort, was no more popular in Texas than it was to prove later in the North.
For one thing, all the men who wanted to fight, or felt they could leave their families, had already gone. For another, there was very little available manpower left on the western frontier. It was not possible to take all men from an agrarian society without grave damage.
The first law, passed in April 1862, applied to all white males between eighteen and thirty-five. Soon after, the limits were raised to fifty and dropped to seventeen. While this early draft is frequently praised as military realism, it had a definitely seamy side.
This draft law was poorly drawn and executed. It was discriminatory and unevenly applied. Officeholders, even petty ones, were exempt, as were men "considered indispensable." Exemptions in medicine and frontier defense made sense, but substitution was permitted. As in the North, a wealthy man could hire a poor one to go in his place. Finally, in Texas, the law was interpreted to exempt almost any substantial man of property and affairs. It was regarded bitterly, both by the civilian population and a large proportion of the soldiers, including those who had volunteered.
Resistance to the law was immediate. Thousands of citizens protested it on principle. General Hébert's reaction, in May 1862, was to put all Texas under martial law. Hébert appointed provost marshals to administer conscription. These officers were responsible only to himself. From this time forward, large parts of Texas were regularly placed under military rule; the powers of the provosts were virtually unlimited. Both Lubbock and the state supreme court reluctantly upheld these acts. This meant there could be no appeal against a Confederate provost marshal's decision.
The ruthless prosecution of the draft and property confiscation codes was actually unnecessary, and the too vigorous enforcement of both drove some parts of the state into actual resistance. As various testaments show, protests were common. "Men who ought to be under the care of a doctor" were pushed into the army. In a country where birth certificates did not exist and records were rare, provosts, often young second lieutenants, decided which boys "were old enough." In some pitiful scenes, men were taken from large families by arbitrary action, leaving them to live on charity, and young boys were hunted down despite their parents' tears. There were heated protests against these acts by prominent men who had given sons to the army, and who were the staunchest Confederates in the state. The confiscation of property also aroused Texan hackles. The property of "disloyal" persons, as adjudged by local officers, was sequestered. There were cases where the lands of men unavoidably detained—by internment in the North—were taken, as well as those of Texans who happened to be fighting for the South in some other state. Unionists suffered greatly, even if they had committed no overt disloyal act.
One of the characteristics of this program was that more attention was paid to the 10 percent trying to avoid commitment to the war than to the 90 percent supporting the state. At the least sign of resistance, military officers were prone to declare whole counties or regions in "rebellion" and dispatch troops. Frequently a peculiarly intolerant and arrogant type of officer sought out this domestic occupation duty; the state troops were noticeably despised by those who had volunteered for service in the East. Incidents became common by 1863.
Martial law interfered with legitimate business, and it humiliated important men traveling legitimately from their residences to other counties. A doctor, lawyer, merchant, or planter could not leave his county of residence, on any business, except with a passport signed by a military officer, who sometimes insulted him in the process. The provosts brooked no protests. An editor was threatened with arrest "for treason" because he wrote that the passport system was a violation of basic right.
Only some 2,000 Texas residents had left to serve with the Union army, but other thousands were really neutral toward the war. Trouble came when the draft was enforced against these. There was violence in pockets of north Texas, where many immigrants from Northern or border states had farms, and among the Germanic element surrounding Fredericksburg and San Antonio. To these protests the Confederate military authorities reacted viciously.
Fredericksburg, a purely German town on the Pedernales, was occupied by troops under Captain James Duff. Duff stated that "the God damn Dutchmen are Unionists to a man," and "I will hang all I suspect of being anti-Confederates." The largely European counties—Gillespie, Kerr, Kendall, Medina, Comal, and San Antonio's Bexar—were immediately in turmoil. General H. P. Bee, commanding in south Texas, virtually declared war on these areas. This persecution drove literally hundreds of men out of the area, and some even into the Union service.