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

Introduction

Introduction In the spring of 1861, alarms calling for war spread across the Lone Star State. “Men of Texas, Look to Your Arms!” exclaimed Ben McCulloch, hero of many of Texas’s conflicts, in Corsicana’s Navaro Express. He concluded his appeal for soldiers using the history and memory of his past struggles for Texas: “Texians! remember your former victories, and prepare to march to others. You won your independence from Mexico, and will again do it from a more tyrannical foe.”1 With this call and many others just like it, numerous young men enlisted in the army, and Texas plunged headfirst into the bloodiest conflict in American history . Texans realized that the fate of their state lay in the results on the battlefield , which created a time of uncertainty. What was Texas’s role in the conflict? How would the men fare during the fighting? What would life be like on the home front? Once the conflict concludes, what affect would it have on the veterans and how would it be remembered? During the American Civil War, Texas faced similar obstacles as the rest of the South but had additional, unique issues. Unlike the rest of the emerging Confederacy, the Lone Star State still had a frontier and a large number of U.S. soldiers within its borders to maintain the relative peace between settlers and American Indians. Although the seat of war was hundreds of miles away on the other side of the Mississippi River, Texans not only participated in those campaigns but still had to defend their frontier homesteads. Being far removed from the balance of the Confederacy, Texans fought farthest from their homes. Three regiments, part of the popularly known Hood’s Texas Brigade, served as the shock troops of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Numerous other regiments served in the western theater, defending Confederate territory between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains, the most famous in this region being Terry’s Texas Rangers. The state itself was vulnerable on every front, especially along its long coastline and its borders with Louisiana, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory. Although this threat was always present, and the Federals did manage to capture some territory, there was never any prolonged Union occupation in the state. Early in the war, Texans became the only Southerners who attempted to add territory to the Confederacy with the campaign to capture the Arizona and New Mexico Territory (with further ambitions to capture California and northern Mexico). Texans thus fought in more places than men from any other state, both North and South. xv With its diverse population, composed mainly of recent migrants from throughout the United States and immigrants from northern and western Europe and Mexico, Texas also experienced internal dissent from Unionists in the north and recently arrived Germans in the Hill Country. Additionally it was the only Southern state that bordered a foreign country, Mexico, which Texans not only relied on for trade but also harbored raiding bandits like Juan Cortina. It was near this border that the last major engagement of the Civil War took place between Union and Confederate Texans at Palmito Ranch. Although the Lone Star State escaped the war relatively untouched, all its people—men, women, children, African Americans, Tejanos, and Germans—were forever changed by the events that transpired. This influenced the way Texans viewed the war and reacted to the consequences of defeat, which we still try to understand today. This anthology brings together a collection of essays by noted historians on Texas in the Civil War and by junior scholars now contributing to the field. Their research provides a new understanding of the role and reactions of Texas and Texans to the Civil War. The greatest strength of this book is its scope. Contributors provide new perspectives on Texas in the Civil War that historians have generally overlooked or never explored before, ranging from new aspects in military, social, and cultural history to public history and historical memory. These studies present important facets of Texas history that can help us understand better what Texans were thinking and how the state affected the history of the United States. The first chapter is broad in scope by placing Texas’ role in the Civil War in the Confederacy’s overall strategy of the conflict, an aspect never examined in its entirety. Joseph G. Dawson III contends that Texas related to Confederate national strategy in four ways: the New Mexico Campaign, the...