Talk:Texas in the American Civil War

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[edit] Hill Country and Secession

Hi. Since there's a fight going on over whether the hill country was anti-secession let's look at some of the facts that are pertinent. We can evaluate these counties by their delegates to the secession convention and by their votes in the secession referendum. Here are the counties that had delegates who opposed secession:

Lamar County: 3 out of 3 delegates Titus County: 1 out of 3 delegates Williamson County: 1 out of 2 delegates Wood County: 2 out of 2 delegates

The results of the referendum can be seen at this map: http://www.texasalmanac.com/politics/secession.html

Again, there are a handful of anti-secession counties including a small cluster around Austin in the Hill Country, but the overwhelming majority of counties were for secession, as were 75% of the state's voters. So yes there was unionist support in some counties, but it was a very small number compared to the counties that supported secession. -- DickDowling 18:04, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

don't mix up secession vote and opposition to the war. The Texans were afraid of massive resistance--that's why they lynched so many antiwar people and kept 2/3 of their army inside Texas. Rjensen 18:11, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Your history is uninformed. You treat the Gainesville hangings as if they were some intentional statewide conspiracy to strike fear into the hearts of unionists, but they weren't. They were a localized mob event at the climax of tensions that had been going on in that region of the state since the late 1850's. There had been skirmishing with abolitionists there for years, including a particularly nasty episode of arson and well poisonings in the summer of 1860. Unfortunately the war provided a pretext for mob action. It started as a military trial of a core group of suspected unionist organizers, who in all probability were guilty of sabotage acts and other insurrectionist activities. But the mobs got involved very quickly and lynched some of the accused while the military court was in recess. It was a random mob occurrence - not a conspiracy out of Austin. Things only went down hill from there when the unionists struck back and assassinated the prosecutor from the military court, prompting the largest of the hangings. -- DickDowling 18:51, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree. The same thing happened all over the state - for example, in the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, slaves and abolitionists were hung, and abolitionists were also driven out of town. The overwhelming majority of the state was pro-secessionist, as in most other Southern states. --Stallions2010 19:13, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Collapse of Confederate Authority Section

Many thanks to Scott Mingus for the rewrite of this section. If anyone else has the article in the SHQ around, perhaps they'd like to take a stab at the flight of Confederate authorities to Mexico (including Shelby's role both reestablishing order and plundering stores along the way)? We could also use more detail on the month of June, and the role of the Federal authorities in occupying Texas, reestablishing order, and Juneteenth. -Ben 18:49, 4 December 2006 (UTC)