History

The Civil War on the Home Front

Willie Nelson and the Birth of the Austin Music Scene

A Brief Sketch of Texas History

By Mike Cox

In a reflective mood, on Aug. 30, 1914, W.D. McDonald wrote a long letter to the Trenton Tribune, his old hometown newspaper in Fannin County. He noted it had been 54 years that month since his honorable discharge from Company C, First U.S. Cavalry, and 52 years since he enlisted in the Confederate Army to fight against some of the same men with whom he had once chased hostile Indians.

Married Sept. 1, 1861—only four months into the Civil War—McDonald built a log cabin near Honey Grove and settled into domestic life. "We ... were happy," he wrote. "But listen, we hear patriotic men and women all over our Southland saying: 'Your homes are in danger of being destroyed.' I, with every fibre of my being going on to that six-months bride in love said, 'Here am I; send me.'"

On Feb. 22, 1862, Mc-Donald enlisted in Company D, 16th Texas Cavalry, "and for three years and four months I did the best I could to protect that log cabin home and that wife."

Unlike many thousands of Texans who fought for the South, McDonald survived unscathed. Late in life, he and his wife moved to Abilene, a West Texas town that had not even existed during the Civil War.

As a young Federal cavalry trooper, McDonald had followed in newspapers the growing sectional crisis that led to what would be the nation's deadliest war. The election of that "Black Republican" Abraham Lincoln as president in the fall of 1860 climaxed nearly a decade of political strife between the slave-reliant South and the more urbanized North. Starting with South Carolina, the Southern states began seceding from the Union as the not-even-century-old nation edged steadily toward fratricidal war.

In Texas, a secession convention composed of 177 locally elected delegates convened in Austin on Jan. 28, 1861. Only five days later, by a vote of 166 to 8, the body adopted an ordinance of secession.

Future governor James W. Throckmorton drew boos when he cast his vote against the measure.

"Mr. President, when the rabble hiss, well may the patriots tremble," he retorted, addressing Oran M. Roberts, the convention's presiding officer. In addition to voting for leaving the Union, the convention created a Committee of Public Safety, which claimed all Federal military installations in Texas, including the U.S. arsenal in San Antonio. U.S. Army Gen. David E. Twiggs, the ranking military officer in Texas, surrendered his entire 3,000-soldier command and relinquished all military property, including 10,000 rifles.

The last chance for Texas to avoid the coming hostilities came with a statewide referendum on Feb. 23, 1861, but 46,153 Texans voted for secession, with only 13,020 voting against leaving the Union. Texas would be the nascent Confederate States of America's seventh star, with four more breakaway states soonto join the confederation.

The nation's long war of words over states rights and the extension of slavery ended on April 12, when Confederate artillery began bombarding Fort Sumter, a Federal harbor defense installation off Charleston, South Carolina. Three days later, President Lincoln signed a proclamation calling for 75,000 militiamen to put down a rebellion. Then, on April 19, he ordered a naval blockade of the Southern states from the mouth of the Rio Grande to South Carolina. Lincoln extended the blockade to Virginia a week later following the secession of that commonwealth and North Carolina.

The first fighting in Texas was Texan versus Texan, as a vicious war within a war broke out in the Hill Country, where many of the liberal-minded German settlers who had come to the state in the mid-1840s opposed slavery and remained loyal to the Union. Confederate militiamen, some more outlaw than soldier, terrorized Gillespie and surrounding counties, lynching Unionists and stealing what they could under the guise of military authority. When the German-Texans in Gillespie County organized as the Union Loyal League to defend themselves against what they called Die Hangerbande (the Hanging Bandits) things only got worse.

By the summer of 1862, the South instituted mandatory military service for all white males 18–35. Needless to say, the German immigrants had no interest in fighting for the Confederacy. James Duff, a dishonorably discharged U.S. Army soldier who now led Confederate forces in the Hill Country, declared the region in open rebellion against the Confederacy. Faced with hanging or conscription, 68 German men decided to ride for Mexico. They made it as far as the Nueces River, when, on Aug. 10, Duff and his men caught up with them. A sharp battle ended with 19 Germans and 12 Confederates dead. An additional nine wounded German-Texans were later executed. The bloody incident broke the spirit of German resistance, but hangings and murders of suspected Union sympathizers continued throughout the war.

The next outbreak of internal strife came along the Red River in North Texas, another pocket of pro-Union sentiment. On Oct. 1, 1862, a roundup of suspected Unionists led to the hanging of seven men following their hasty trial for treason. Fourteen more were lynched without benefit of a court proceeding. When one of the leaders of the Unionist cleanup was murdered, his killer was soon hanged. But 19 others suspected of Union complicity also got lynched in Gainesville, with five more hanged in Sherman. The event became known as the Great Hanging at Gainesville and still stands as one of the worst episodes of vigilantism in U.S. history.

1861 Referendum on Secession

The same month the hangings began in North Texas, the U.S. Navy captured Galveston, which ranked as Texas' largest and most prosperous city. One of the busiest ports on the Gulf of Mexico, its capture had been a key objective of Federal war planners. Federal control of the port, which came on Oct. 8, 1862, made it even harder for blockade-runners to escape with cotton to sell in the foreign market and for the South to receive badly needed supplies.

Earlier that year, on Aug. 16–18, 1862, the U.S. Navy shelled Corpus Christi and attacked by land, but an attempt to take the town failed. One possible factor in that came to light when Confederate defenders noticed that an inordinate number of Federal shells had not exploded on impact. Examining one of the still-intact rounds, someone discovered it held whiskey, not gunpowder. Though not mentioned in the official record of the engagement, the enduring legend is that some of the Yankee seaman had been emptying shells to hide their clandestine whiskey supply. Elsewhere along the Texas coast, Federal naval forces conducted periodic offensive operations from 1862 to...