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Confederate States Of America

Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of November 1860 made South Carolina's secession from the Union December 20 a foregone conclusion. The state had long been waiting for an event that would unite the South against the antislavery forces. By February 1, 1861, five more Southern states had seceded. On February 8, the six states signed a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. The remaining Southern states as yet remained in the Union, although Texas had begun to move on its secession.

Less than a month later, March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he declared the Confederacy "legally void." His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union, but the South turned a deaf ear. On April 12, Confederate guns opened fire on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. A war had begun in which more Americans would die than in any other conflict before or since.

In the seven states that had seceded, the people responded positively to the Confederate action and the leadership of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Both sides now tensely awaited the action of the slave states that thus far had remained loyal. Virginia seceded on April 17; Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed quickly.

No state left the Union with greater reluctance than Virginia. Her statesmen had a leading part in the winning of the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, and she had provided the nation with five presidents. With Virginia went Colonel Robert E. Lee, who declined the command of the Union Army out of loyalty to his native state. Between the enlarged Confederacy and the free-soil North lay the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which, despite some sympathy with the South, would remain loyal to the Union.

Sam Houston served two terms as President of the new Lone Star Republic, and by skillful diplomacy helped bring about its annexation to the United States in 1845. During the years that ensued, he served as a senator in Washington, where he joined Clay and Webster in trying to maintain peace between North and South.

Upon returning to Texas from Washington in the spring of 1859, Houston was sixty-six, but although the wounds of Horseshoe Bend and San Jacinto ached painfully on rainy days, and although his once-thick chestnut hair was thin and white, his massive six-foot-two-inch frame was straight and vigorous, and his blue eyes remained clear and commanding. Above all, he retained his sense of destiny, and with it a young man’s ability to dream. His present dream was nothing less than becoming President of the United States and saving the nation from the civil war that threatened it.

It was only natural that Houston would want to culminate his career with the highest office and greatest honor of all. To understand his desire to save the Union—at a time when many of his friends would willingly have seen it dissolved—one must realize that Houston was a loyal disciple of Andrew Jackson.

Back in 1830, when South Carolina had first threatened secession, Old Hickory had declared, “Our Union: it must be preserved!” In the mounting crisis of the eighteen fifties, Houston made this his guiding principle. Like Jackson, he believed that slavery was an artificial issue, concocted and exploited for partisan purposes by unscrupulous demagogues on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. But he feared that unless something was done to reduce sectional hostility, the inevitable result would be the breakup of the Union.

What was needed, he decided, was some great new issue or cause that would distract the public mind from the slavery controversy and restore national unity. After trying and discarding various other devices, he finally took up the gaudy banner of Manifest Destiny: He would unite the American people by appealing to their powerful lust for territorial expansion.

To the south lay Mexico—enticingly rich, invitingly weak. Houston envisioned himself as taking the lead in establishing an American “protectorate” there. Not only would the North and South forget their differences to join in this glorious enterprise, but a grateful and admiring nation would reward him with the White House. As President, Houston would act in the tradition of Jackson, harmonizing the interests of all sections and discrediting all those fanatics and demagogues who would destroy the Union.

Such, at any rate, was Houston’s reasoning. It was indeed, as Walter Prescott Webb called it, a “grand plan,” characteristic in its magnitude of the man who conceived it. And, so far as a Mexican conquest was concerned, it was not nearly as fantastic as it may appear in retrospect.

But before he could conquer Mexico, Houston had first to reconquer Texas. In 1854 he and John Bell of Tennessee had been the only two Southern senators to vote against Stephen A. Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the controversial measure that repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had barred slavery in that portion of the Louisiana Purchase that lay north of latitude 36° 30′. Since most Texans believed that the Kansas-Nebraska Bill favored the South, Senator Houston’s opposition to it lost him much of his support. Texans everywhere in the state had now begun to realize that the Kansas-Nebraska Act had merely led to trouble for the South; in 1859 they were prepared to vote for Houston for the very same reason they had voted against him in 1857—his stanch opposition to the act.

In that speech, delivered at Nacogdoches, he denounced his opponents as secessionists motivated by an unholy desire for office and power. The South, he declared, was in no real or immediate danger from the North; but if it were, it would find safety under the Constitution and within the Union. When the votes were tallied, the old hero had 36,257 to 27,500 for Runnels. The defeat of 1857 was avenged.

During the recent war with Mexico, one young officer had stood out above all the others for courage, skill, and endurance. By a fortunate coincidence this officer arrived in Texas early in 1860 to take command of the operations against Cortinas. He was from Virginia, he held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, and his name was Robert E. Lee.

Houston contacted Lee through A. M. Lea, a close friend who previously had recommended the tall Virginian as an ideal leader for the Mexican expedition. Houston must have been impressed (which indicates, incidentally, how highly Lee was regarded even before he became a great general), for he instructed Lea to offer the Virginian command of the proposed invasion.

The secession crisis of 1861 provided the opportunity. Public sentiment in Texas following Lincoln’s election overwhelmingly favored emulating South Carolina and the other southern states that were pulling out of the Union. Houston knew that the secession of Texas was sooner or later inevitable.

But was it inevitable that Texas join the new “confederacy” being set up at Montgomery, Alabama? Was there any reason why the old Lone Star Republic could not be re-established? And, as an independent nation, why could not Texas take over Mexico? Houston gave public expression to these thoughts early in January, 1861.

Unfortunately, Houston’s go-it-alone policy went counter to the desire and expectations of most Texans. Only some of the old settlers, with nostalgic memories of the Republic, supported him. When he spoke in Waco in favor of a “separate Republic of the Lone Star,” the crowd responded with three cheers for South Carolina, and newspapers throughout the state denounced him as a “submissionist” and a “traitor to the South.” Never before—not even in 1857—had Houston’s popularity sunk so low.

He believed, however, that “given time, I can, in any situation, bring Texas to my bidding.” He had done so on numerous occasions in the past, and he now sought to do so again by employing delaying tactics designed to prevent the state from seceding until he could bring about a change in public sentiment.

But the secessionists, who readily guessed Houston’s intention, were too powerful and determined to be denied. Over his strenuous objections they had the legislature call into being a state convention, which on February i, 1861, voted 167 to 7 in favor of secession as the first step in joining the Confederacy. Houston’s opposition, however, forced the convention to submit its action to a popular referendum—the only one held in any of the Southern states that left the Union. The referendum, he hoped, would serve to postpone secession while he took his case for a new Lone Star Republic directly to the people.

Pro-Confederate mobs and night riders terrorized many Unionists into voting for secession or at least staying away from the polls. Many other Texans were simply indifferent to the outcome, or else felt that the result was foreordained. Altogether, less than half the eligible voters went to the polls, and those who did voted three to one in favor of secession. Accordingly, on March 2, the convention proclaimed Texas out of the Union. Ironically, it was both the twenty-fifth anniversary of Texas’ independence and the sixty-eighth birthday of Sam Houston. The Southern nationalists were the masters of Texas. Its flag was to be not the Lone Star but the Stars and Bars.

An offer of help came from President Abraham Lincoln. It was not Lincoln’s first approach. Sometime in February, while still President-elect, he had sent a letter to Houston by means of an agent named George D. Giddings in which he proposed, as soon as he should be inaugurated, to send an army to help Houston keep Texas in the Union. He then told Giddings to inform Lincoln that he did not desire his assistance, and that instead of more Federal troops in Texas, those already there should be withdrawn in order to avoid civil war.

Lincoln, misled by inaccurate newspaper accounts of Houston’s fight against secession, apparently thought that Giddings, a Democrat, had failed to report the Governor’s views correctly. In any case, late in March, following his inauguration, he sent Colonel Frederick W. Lander to Texas with a confidential message for Houston. At the same time, the War Department ordered Colonel Carlos A. Waite, commander of the federal garrison in Texas, to establish an entrenched camp for the purpose of giving “aid and comfort to General Houston.”

Lander arrived in Austin about March 29—two weeks after the convention had deposed Houston- and communicated to him the plan to support him with Waite’s army. Once again the Texan thrust aside Lincoln’s assistance; he even wrote to Waite, protesting against “the concentration of troops in fortifications in Texas.” He loved the Union but he loved Texas as much, if not more. He would not plunge his state into civil war in order to keep it in the Union against its manifest wish, tragically mistaken though he thought that wish to be.

Back in 1854 he had predicted that secession would lead to war, and that war would result in the South’s going down “in the unequal contest, in a sea of blood and smoking ruin.” Now, making his way homeward from Austin, he stopped at Brenham and made a speech in which he repeated this warning. His listeners merely laughed; the local secessionists threatened to kill him if he did not stop making such “treasonable statements.”

So Houston’s dream came to an end. He had waited too long to achieve it. Had he been younger, and had the Civil War been averted or postponed, he might have succeeded. As it was, his scheme was doomed to failure from the start. He had hoped to heal the division of the country through expansion; but the division, culminating in secession and war, made expansion impossible.∗ Even if Houston’s plan had succeeded, a Texas-initiated protectorate over Mexico might have precipitated the very conflict he sought to prevent, for the North undoubtedly would have regarded it as a Southern plot to extend the sway of slavery. Yet in waging his fight to keep Texas in the Union, or at least out of the Confederacy, he had displayed magnificent courage and prophetic foresight. There are those who would contend that this last battle, though it ended in defeat, was his greatest one.

After the outbreak of the war which he had feared and predicted, Houston loyally supported the Confederacy—in public. In private, he continued to speculate on the possibility of reviving the Lone Star Republic, and even dabbled in some intrigues to that purpose. He lived long enough to see his warning—that secession would lead to disaster for the South—begin to come true. Moreover, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had regained much of his old popularity, as more and more Texans came to regret that they had not listened to him. By the summer of 1863 Texas newspapers were mentioning Houston as a likely candidate for governor, and most of them conceded that if he ran he would win. So old Sam had been right after all: given time, he could always get Texans to come around to his way of thinking. Only now there was no more time. On July 26, 1863, after a short illness, he died at his ranch near Huntsville—truly the last of his race.

Virginia at War Suffering from continuous invasions and upheaval, the state of Virginia stood at the forefront of the Civil War's drama as its citizens faced enormous disruptions and challenges. This book details the activities at the convention on the eve of secession, explains how Richmond became the capital of the Confederate States of America and explores the story behind the state's secession.

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