The Fate of Texas: The Civil War and the Lone Star State

7. New Perspectives on Texas Germans and the Confederacy

7 New Perspectives on Texas Germans and the Confederacy Walter D. Kamphoefner Texas, which was home to 20,000 of the 70,000 Germans residing in the eleven Confederate states, was the only place where the German element was large enough to play an appreciable role in politics and war.1 Just what role these Texans played, however, still remains under dispute. In the popular press various characterizations of Germans have portrayed them as everything from “fire-breathing secessionists” to “virtually all Unionists.”2 The range of scholarly opinion is nearly as broad. Older accounts often reflect the characterization of antebellum traveler Frederick Law Olmstead, portraying Germans as largely abolitionist in sentiment. Recent scholarship has cautioned against generalizing from a few radical “Forty-Eighters” to the bulk of ordinary German immigrants. But perhaps this scholarship has gone too far in attempting to place Texas Germans into the mainstream of the Lone Star State. One of the most influential of these revisionists, geographer Terry Jordan, has pointed out important distinctions between East and West Texas Germans as far as attitudes toward slavery and the Civil War are concerned. Eastern settlements were older, their immigrants more acculturated to American values, and 105 Treue der Union Monument in Comfort, Texas. Courtesy Walter D. Kamphoefner their local economy well suited for plantation agriculture and slavery. The Hill Country west of Austin, by contrast, was more recently settled. With its semiarid ranching economy, it had very few slaveholders, Anglo or German. A frontier region, it was exposed to dangers of Indian attacks should Federal military protection be withdrawn—a consideration that also promoted Unionism among Hill Country Anglos. In a more recent work, Jordan outlines four “myths, or stereotypes,” regarding Texas Germans: they “(1) did not own slaves, (2) favored the abolitionist cause, (3) were morally opposed to slavery, and (4) harbored Unionist sentiments,” all of which he claims were “inaccurate” when applied to “many or most” ordinary Texas Germans. While Jordan is certainly correct in disputing that Germans were fully united on any of these issues, he goes too far in his revisions and exaggerates the degree to which Germans agreed with Anglo Texans on issues such as slavery, race, secession, and Civil War.3 Neither he nor anyone else has dug deeply into the local press for precinct-level voting returns or other evidence of German attitudes toward the Confederacy, nor has anyone closely examined patterns of German slaveholding in relation to overall property holdings. One must beware of geographical determinism in explaining the regional differences among Texas Germans in slave ownership or support for secession. Although geographic conditions in the Hill Country may have discouraged slavery , Jordan’s own work shows that in three counties where 11 percent of the Anglo families owned slaves, not a single German did. According to Jordan, lack of capital was the main factor restricting slaveholdings among Germans in eastern Texas. Yet a recent study has documented some sixty Germans in the older settlements in Austin, Fayette, and Colorado counties who did own slaves between 1840 and 1865. Still, despite the strong presence of Germans in these counties, they made up less than 5 percent of local slaveowners (see table 1). Moreover, at every level of wealth, a higher proportion of Anglos than Germans owned slaves. For example, among persons worth from $3,000 to $6,000, more than 50 percent of the Anglos but barely 2 percent of the Germans were slaveowners . People of the servant-keeping class in Germany, especially those from the East Elbian nobility, were especially prone to slaveholding. But even among the wealthy worth over $15,000, only 50 percent of the Germans owned slaves in contrast to 92 percent of the American born. Moreover, the size of the slaveholdings were smaller among Germans, who made up 4 percent of the slaveowners but possessed only 2 percent of the slaves in the area. Granted, slaveholding was a voluntary act among Germans unless they married into an Anglo family, whereas many old-stock Americans in Texas inherited slaves rather than purchasing them outright. But contrasts of this magnitude could hardly have arisen without a conscious choice by many or most Germans against human property. New Perspectives on Texas Germans and the Confederacy 107 TABLE 1 Slaveownership, Ethnicity, and Wealth Levels in Fayette County, Texas, 1860 Total Property Value Germans Slaves owned Anglos Slaves owned in $1,000 by Germans by Anglos...