The Texas Border Cotton Trade, 1862-1863

THE TEXAS BORDER COTTON TRADE, 1862-1863 Fredericka Meiners Cotton served many purposes for the Confederacy. The cornerstone of the economy, it was a ready medium of exchange at home and abroad. It could buy whatever the Confederacy needed— arms, ammunition, perhaps even that most elusive of items, diplomatic recognition. By denying cotton to the foreign textile mills, Jefferson Davis and his advisers tried to make it into a weapon to force Britain or France to interfere in the war or to acknowledge the existence of the new country. To that end, in May 1861, the government prohibited trade with the United States and placed an embargo on the exportation of cotton and other produce except through southern seaports. To supply its industry and avoid economic dislocation, Britain would certainly have to break the Union blockade, southern leaders thought.1 No matter what the diplomatic schemes might have been, cotton 's primary importance continued to be economic. The government wanted to use it to buy supplies for the army and otherwise support the war effort, but moved slowly to control the trade. In private hands, however, much of the amount exported went to Yankee mills and too little to the import of essentials. Furthermore, private speculators, Confederate contractors, and state agents all competed for a limited total amount. The government quickly found itself, if not in a losing position, certainly not in a winning one. Nowhere was this situation truer than in the area known as the Trans-Mississippi. The exception to the rule of no trade across land frontiers was the Texas-Mexico border; since Mexico was neutral, the Union was unable to stop cotton exports through that country. Southern trade grew rapidly, and by the middle of 1862, Brownsville , Texas, and Matamoros across the Rio Grande had all the appearances of California in the gold rush of 1849. Cotton, bought for five to ten cents a pound in the interior, could be sold for twice, three times, four times as much and more on the world market. 1 Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Rehtions of the Confederate States of America (Chicago, 1931), pp. 12-14, 25-44; Henry Blumenthal, "Confederate Diplomacy: Popular Notions and International Realities," Journal of Southern History, XXXII (May, 1966), 152-171. 293 294civil war history Entrepreneurs, speculators, agents, and brokers flocked to the border area, and cotton began to move to the river towns—Brownsville , Rio Grande City, Laredo, and Eagle Pass.2 To assure importation of military supplies in this chaotic market, the army made the first attempts to regulate and control the trade in 1862. The officers in charge were General P. O. Hebert, commanding the District of Texas, and Brigadier General H. P. Bee, commanding the Western Sub-District, which included that most sensitive of areas, the Rio Grande Valley. Hebert was an easterner and not wellliked , but Bee was a Texan and had lived and worked on the border, even representing Webb County in the Texas Legislature.3 In May 1862 Hebert, in Houston, ordered prohibition of cotton exports except according to whatever rules and regulations the military authorities made; he left specification of those rules to the sub-district commanders. Although uncertain of Hébert's object, control of transportation or control of cotton itself, Bee, in San Antonio , published Hébert's order and required permits to export cotton .4 Hébert made no alterations in Bee's orders, but Bee had immediate problems. He had declared that permits would be issued to those with state or Confederate contracts and to those trading cotton for "articles of necessity" for the government or the people. He would give no permits to those traders who were "notoriously disloyal" or who were trying to remove themselves and their property from the country. Bee was quickly inundated by all sorts of promises and assurances, pledging future imports, claiming large monetary expenditures which benefitted the country generally, and declaring large amounts of property and interests in Texas. Trying to decide who was entitled to permits became an almost impossible job.5 Bee also wanted an export tax on cotton as a controlling measure and as a source of badly needed revenue...