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

2. Warriors, Husbands, and Fathers: Confederate Soldiers and Their Families

2 Warriors, Husbands, and Fathers Confederate Soldiers and Their Families Richard Lowe In traditional combat histories written during the first century after the American Civil War, the relationships of soldiers and their families were not examined in any detail. Who won battles and wars, and why and how they won them—these were the foremost questions in conventional historical accounts, and few readers asked for more. In the last few decades, however, increasing numbers of writers have broadened their perspectives to examine the ways in which war and society intersect. How does society shape war, and how does war shape society? This double-edged question opens countless new windows into the Civil War: discord on the home front, morale in the army, divisions of class and race, urban development, environmental effects, gender relationships, trade patterns, wartime migration—the possibilities seem limitless. This “new military history” is not as new as it is often portrayed by its practitioners . As early as 1912 the president of the American Historical Association, one Theodore Roosevelt, called for a broader definition of military history. More than six decades ago, in 1943, a young scholar named Bell Wiley published one 25 of the very best examples of new military history—a book that still influences the writing of Civil War history—The Life of Johnny Reb, a close look at the character and behavior of common Confederate soldiers. Nevertheless, only in recent decades have these new questions about the war attracted sustained attention by large numbers of historians.1 One topic that has intrigued researchers interested in family and gender relations is the interaction between married men who went off to war and their wives and children on the home front. Some writers of family history have found that nineteenth-century American husbands were generally remote and cold, distant from their mates. They were overbearing patriarchs, insensitive to the emotional needs of their wives, who had to sustain themselves without the sentimental or tender support of a husband. Other scholars have detected a very different type of husband in Confederate gray: affectionate, loving, and sensitive to his family’s needs.2 Where did the Texas soldier place in this range? Did he gambol off to war with little thought of the hardships his family might encounter in his absence? Did he regard wife and children primarily as traditional trappings to full manhood ? Or was the typical untamed Texan really, at heart, a sentimental and caring husband who longed for a wife’s loving embrace and a child’s playful cuddle? Hundreds of letters from soldiers in three of the state’s most storied Civil War units—Hood’s Texas Brigade, Terry’s Texas Rangers, and Walker’s Texas Division —definitely place the Texans in the second category. Some haughty patriarchs may have mingled among the other troops, but they left little evidence of their presence in their letters home to Texas. The pain of separation from loved ones struck some men even before they reached their first destinations after leaving Texas. William E. Stoker, a farmer from the Coffeeville community of Upshur County in northeastern Texas, wrote his wife shortly after marching off to Arkansas that he was already aching for home: “Betty, I cant express my feelings when I think of you and Priscilla [his young daughter]. My heart leaps, but at the same time being so fare off and cant come home and see you it almost makes my heart break.” Stoker kept his wife’s letters, but when he looked at them in moments alone, he admitted, “I cant keep from weepping about you, feeling so loley [lonely] bye your self.” To make matters worse, he had to face the possibility that he would never see her again: “I want to see you so bad, I am nearley ded but I dont know wether I will eveer be blessed with the pleasure of seeing you any more or not. . . . If I ever get the chance to come [home], I am a comeing like a feather in the wind.”3 Edward Ross, a member of the Eighth Texas Cavalry (also known as Terry’s Texas Rangers), missed his wife and children in Milam County in central Texas as soon as he crossed the state line on his way to the war. “There is but one thing 26 Richard Lowe that trulbles me and that is leaveing you and the children[.] if I...