Jack of Harts

The State of Texas counted just over four hundred thousand free citizens when Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Just over forty thousand of them voted in favor of secession. Over seventy thousand, some estimates say as many as ninety thousand, Texans took arms in defense of their State and the Confederacy. And over two thousand took up arms for the Union. That is as many as twenty percent of their free population, effectively an entire generation of their young men. They raised over forty-five regiments of capable Texas cavalry troops to form the backbone of the Confederacy’s screening and harassing forces, along with heavy infantry and artillery support, and five more cavalry regiments on the Union side. Texans fought in every major battle of the Civil War, often on both sides, and it is impossible to underestimate how much the army they sent east changed the nature of the war. The South certainly would have fallen far sooner than it did.