THE ROLE of TEXAS in the CONFEDERACY TIESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State College in Partial Fulfil
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THE ROLE OF TEXAS IN THE CONFEDERACY TIESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Bonnye Ruth Whitworth, B. A. Harlingen, Texas January, 1951 I8:2y) TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. BACKGROUND OF TEE SECESSION MOVEMENT . 1 II. SECESSION ACCOMPLISHED . - - . -- . ." * 28 III. LEADERSHIP? IN TIE CONFEDERACY . ... 41 IV. AT TE BATTLE FRONTS EAST OF TlE MISSIsIppI RIVER - * - - - - - - . 61 V. TEXAS AND THE TRANS- MISSISIPI DEPARTMENT . 85 VI. THE STATE AND THE CONFEDERACY . " VII. TE WAR AND THE PEOPLE . 1l BIBLIOGRAPHY " - - - -. - - - -. .. - A.. 166 1In CHAPTER I BACKGROUND OF TEE SECESSION MOVEMENT Texas was predestined to play an outstanding role in the all-encompassing upheaval known variously to historians as "The War" Civil and "The War Between the States." The entrance of Texas into the Union had been the result of much conniving, many inflammatory speeches, and the expression of many sincere beliefs on the part of the leaders of the United States. She took her place after 1845 as a slave state. So far as economics was concerned, this position had been de- cided for her by her natural location. The increase in the number of slaves from 38,753 in 1846 to 180,682 in 1860 in- dicates that the state was included by nature within the 'natural limits 1 of slavery." Her political stand was de- cided by the people of the state during the years immedi- ately preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. That stand, which was to place Texas with the ten other states in the Confederate States of America, could, no doubt, have been easily foretold from the time Texas entered the Union. Nine- ty per cent of the white population of Texas had come from the Old South2 and it would be reasonable to presume that IL. W. Newton and H. P. Gambrell, A Social and Political Richardson,.2R.N. Texas the Lone Star State, p. 241. 1 2 the majority of these people would reflect the views of that section. That conclusion, correctly drawn though it may be, would not show the true picture of the personal indecision, the mob hysteria, and high emotional tension that were to characterize the people of Texas during the early fifties. It was the fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill that first drew Texas into the arena of national politics. Sam Houston, then United States Senator, opposed the bill and lost much of his popularity. This stand on the Kansas- Nebraska Bill had much to do with losing the governorship f or him in 1857. The campaign of that year was styled "Houston versus Democracy." Many bitter and acrimonious speeches were made. The attacks on Houston by the press were severe. His whole record as a United States Senator was reviewed and condemned. He was accused of vindicating before the Senate a petition of 3,000 New England clergymen and of voting against all bills in the interest of slavery; of blaming frontier settlements for their Indian outrages; of preaching submission to Fremont; and of using the Baptist Church for the purpose of advancing his political prospects. 3 He was supported by the Union Democrats and remnants of the Whig and Know-Nothing parties in Texas. This struggle cul- minated in the election of H. R. Runnels as Governor and 3Anna Irene Sandbo, "Beginnings of the Secession Move- ment in Texas," The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XVIII (July, 1914.), 57. 3 F. I, Lubbock as Lieutenant-Governor. Governor Runnels was an extreme state-rights man. In his inauguration speech he openly advocated secession as the remedy if the trouble in Kansas should not be settled in a manner satisfactory to the South. He said, in part: Year by year the South is growing weaker, and the North is growing stronger. That equilibrium has been destroyed which afforded the only sure and per- manent guarantee of protection against abolition. .. Should this proposition be decided in the nega- tive, I do not hesitate to believe that the deter- mination of Texas will be taken to assume the guard- ianship of her own destinies and bid adieu to a con- nection no longer consistent with the rights, dig-4 nity, and honor of an equal and independent state. In a message to the legislature in January, 1858, he recom- mended that the legislature pass a resolution declaring the sentiment of the people of Texas in regard to Northern ag- gression, and that it provide a way by which Texas could co- operate with other Southern states in protecting their rights. The legislature responded with a resolution which met the requirements of Runnels' first suggestion. To meet the second, the legislature authorized the governor to or- der an election of seven delegates to a Southern Convention, whenever a majority of the other slaveholding states should think such a convention necessary. If it should become necessary for Texas to act alone, the governor was author- ized to call a special session of the legislature in order 4William McCraw, Professional Politicians, p. 110. a. that it might call a convention. A more radical measure had been proposed earlier by Judge T. J. Chambers, an in- fluential Democratic party leader in the state. He advo- cated withdrawal from the Union in case the Federal govern- ment should try to embarrass, delay, or defeat the admission of Kansas as a member of the Union on any pretext referring to slavery.5 This resolution was tabled, but it represented the sentiments of many. In 1857 John H. Reagan was the spokesman for the milder state-rights group. He entered Congress in that year deter- mined to avoid questions of sectionalism. However, he was soon forced to take a stand. In a speech in the House of Representatives, he said: I repudiate all sectional heresies. I repudi- ate everything that is not national. I denounce fanaticism in the South with the same distinctness that I denounce the fanaticism of abolitionism in the North. They are both heresies. They are alike dangerous to . .6the mission of the great and glorious Republic. The newspapers in Texas were bitter in their attacks on him. They said of him in 1859 that "he won't run 'cause he can't win." This was the challenge needed to bring him out. In a speech made while seeking re-election he declared, "I will resist sectionalism and revolution and fraud and force 5 Sandbo, "Beginnings of the Secession Movement in Texas," p. cit., p. 58. McCraw, . cit., p. 192. 5 and wrong alike faithfully, whether they come from the North or the South. " Slavery was alike a cause and a characteristic of that sectionalism, both in the United States and within the state itself. From the time of the first Anglo settlers slavery in some form seemed absolutely essential to the development of Texas. The land was a wilderness upon which single la- borers made little or no impression. Even Austin, who was personally opposed to slavery, recognized this and bowed to 8 necessity. Slavery, then, rooted itself most firmly in the populous eastern and southeastern counties, along the Sabine, Trinity, Brazos, and Colorado rivers, where the plantation system was in almost exclusive possession and conditions, social and economic, were practically identical with those existing in the older slave states.9 However, a large part of the people had. no direct in- terest in slavery. Large plantations with a hundred or more Negroes did not gain the foothold in Texas that they had in the Old South. In the early days, one Negro family was more often the rule than a crew of fifty slaves. 1 0 7 lbid., P. 193. %Eugene C. Barker, "African Slave Trade in Texas," The uarterl of the Texas State Historical Association, VI October, 1902), 150. 9 C. W. Ramsdell, Reconstruction in Texas, p. 11. Abigail Curlee, "The History of a Texas Slave Planta- tion, 1861-1863," The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XXVI (October, 1921), . 6 Certainly, even by the late fifties, there were not many slaves in the fringe of frontier counties extending from north to south across the center of the state; the German settlers in the southwest owned but few slaves; and in the northern counties most of the people had recently come from Tennessee, Kentucky, and states north of the Ohio and did not own many slaves. 1 1 The geographic location of slavery does not show its true importance. By 1860 slavery accounted for the major wealth in Texas. In that year the total value of all slaves was $106,688,920, an average of $672 a head. The value of slave property was twenty per cent greater than that of the lands in Texas. While the number of slave owners in Texas was 21,878, only one tenth owned twenty or more slaves. Yet, small as the number was, these men were prob- ably the most influential men in the state.1 2 Beginning in 1848, there appeared two distinct fac- tions, divided in their opinions on the question of the se- curity of slave property in the territories. At the time that Houston in the United States Senate was voting for the creation of the Territory of Oregon without slavery, louis T. Wigfall, Ashbel Smith, and other constituents were con- tending that neither Congress nor a territorial government 11R. N. Richardson and C. C. Rister, The Greater South- west, p. 259. 1 2 L. W. Newton and H. P. Gambrell, Texas Yesterday and Today, p. 228. lgm,4ft 7 had the right to abolish the institution of slavery in any territory.