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.

Sam Houston wore many hats in his lifetime. He was a Representative and Governor of Tennessee, and leader of the Texian army that defeated Santa Anna. He was the first and third President of the Republic of Texas, and served as Senator and Governor of the State of Texas. There were few politicians in all of Texas who had as much respect and prestige as Sam Houston, but the Democrat Party had spent over a decade establishing themselves as the dominant force in Texas politics. Houston urged their Secession Convention to reject secession due to the horrors of war and the probability that The South would lose any conflict with the Union. But even his prestige had limits, the convention voted to secede, and just over ten percent of the State’s free population voted to ratify it. Under four percent voted against it. Houston then urged Texas to return to its status as a Republic and to remain neutral between North and South. But the Secession Convention further voted to join the Confederacy, and when called to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy he remained seated and silent. They removed Sam Houston from office for that refusal, and he died two years later, a reluctant citizen of a Confederacy at war with the Union he had grown up in.

Texas joined a United States of America in the middle of a time of great division. It was in fact that division that had made Texas Annexation a controversy. Northern Free States did not want Texas to join the Union because they did not want to add another Southern Slave State. They feared it would give more power to the Slave States, and they felt their fears realized with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It sentenced those who helped accused escaped slaves with six months in prison, officials who didn’t arrest them with fines of one thousand dollars, and deprived the accused escaped slave of the right to demand a jury trial or testify in their own defense. The Slave States considered it a simple protection of their property rights. Free States felt like they were being forced to participate in slavery and some outright nullified the law. Many Abolitionists publicly proclaimed their violations of the law and dared officials to arrest them, and juries across the North refused to convict those charged with violating it. The South did not take kindly to this blatant rejection of their rights, and Texas found itself caught in the middle of the growing crisis.