The Union Surrenders the Texas Frontier
Going into the election of 1860, tensions in the United States over the legal status of slavery in the territories had reached a boiling point. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act meant any new states admitted to the Union out of the lands acquired from the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession could vote on allowing slavery in their state constitutions. This doctrine of “popular sovereignty” had led to bloodshed in Kansas over that prospective state’s constitution, and the rise of the Republican Party, which opposed any expansion of slavery, created a national tinderbox.
The race became a four-way election. Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln faced off against dueling Democratic nominees Senator Stephen A. Douglas and Vice-President John Breckenridge. Former Senator John Bell was nominated by the nascent Constitutional Union party consisting of southerners and former Whigs opposed to secession, narrowly beating Texas governor Sam Houston. Lincoln would win a majority of the electoral college by carrying only the northern states. He did not even appear on the ballot in many southern states.
Following Lincoln’s election, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860, three months before the inauguration. The following January, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana also seceded. The debate in Texas was much more controversial. Texas had been admitted as a slave state when it was annexed in 1845, being south of the line established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Most of the migrants to Texas had come from the southern states and imported their economic system for the production of cotton and sugar, which featured slave labor. This system became firmly entrenched in east Texas, which developed strong economic and cultural ties with the rest of the Deep South that led to broad support for secession.
Newer immigrant groups from Central Europe who settled in Central Texas were generally pro-union. And unlike the other southern states, the western frontier cut right through the middle of Texas, and the residents there relied on federal troops and a series of Army posts for protection from the Plains tribes, mainly Comanche and Apache. One line of forts stretched from the Red River to the Rio Grande and included garrisons at Fort Worth and San Antonio, the headquarters of the Department of Texas of the US Army. Another line of forts stretched from San Antonio to El Paso to defend the border with Mexico. Another line of smaller camps stretched along the 600-mile frontier 100 miles west of San Antonio from Eagle Pass northward past what are now the cities of Mason, Coleman, and Breckenridge.
The centers of business and population at the time were in east Texas, and most elected officials and political and business leaders supported secession. Sam Houston, former President of the Republic of Texas and the current governor of the state, was one of the few exceptions. Governor Houston actively campaigned for staying in the Union and refused to call a session of the state legislature to consider the secession question. However, a separate state secession convention voted nearly unanimously to secede in February of 1861, and it was ratified by popular referendum. The Texas legislature immediately voted to send delegates to the new Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama. Governor Houston refused to swear an oath to the Confederacy or acknowledge its legitimacy, so the legislature declared the governorship vacant and replaced him with the lieutenant governor. Houston would retire to Huntsville where he passed away two years later.
This left the issue of federal property in the state to be resolved. 2,700 United States soldiers were stationed throughout Texas mostly at the frontier forts and the scattered camps further west. Major General David E. Twiggs was their commanding officer and stationed in San Antonio. If these forces were surrendered without a contingency, it would expose settlers near the frontier line to raids by the Comanche and Apache and potentially roll back the frontier over one hundred miles. Texas appointed a “Commission of Public Safety” to work with Twiggs to negotiate an orderly surrender of Union forces.
On February 16, Texas Revolution and Mexican-American war veteran Ben McCulloch led a company of armed volunteers to the Alamo, where Twiggs was garrisoned. McCulloch had been commissioned as a colonel by Confederate president Jefferson Davis to demand the surrender of federal property in Texas. Outnumbered, Twiggs peacefully surrendered all federal property in the state and agreed to evacuate all Union forces. Union soldiers were allowed to peacefully leave their posts with their belongings, and all federal posts in the state of Texas were surrendered to the Confederacy without a shot fired.
Among the surrendered forces was Lt. Colonel Robert E Lee. Lee had been made commanding officer of Fort Mason, a frontier fort 100 miles northwest of San Antonio, shortly after an assignment to end incursions by Mexican forces at Fort Brown near Brownsville, Texas. Fort Mason was Lee’s last command as a member of the United States Army. Shortly after returning to Washington and being offered the rank of Major General in the Union Army, Lee resigned and joined the Confederate Army. Like many frontier forts, Fort Mason was abandoned by the Confederacy, only being occupied briefly in 1862 to imprison deserters and suspected Union sympathizers.
The future status of the frontier posts was unclear. Union forces no longer occupied these posts and the Confederacy did not have sufficient resources to man them unless some Union troops switched allegiance. Border posts such as Fort Clark, Fort Brown, and Fort Bliss remained occupied to defend from incursions over the Mexican border. Outside the few posts with a token Confederate presence, mainly the commanding officers, volunteer companies were formed by a combination of settlers, former Union troops, state militia, and Texas Rangers.
One such post was Camp Colorado, located about 10 miles northeast of what is now the city of Coleman, Texas. the camp was on the frontier line along the 200-mile route between Forts Belknap and Mason. Established in 1856 in response to the westward movement of the frontier, it was a key post for defending from incursions of Comanche. Commanding officers included future Confederate generals John Bell Hood and Fitzguh Lee, and the camp was under Robert E. Lee’s supervision during his brief posting at Fort Mason. Like other frontier camps, its adobe brick buildings formed the core of local settlement in the area.
The camp was technically abandoned on February 26, 1861, in keeping with General Twiggs’ order. With nowhere else to go, all men at the post went into Confederate service as part of the Texas state militia and continued to man the post and protect settlers from Comanche attacks. One of those men was my three times great grandfather Elias Briggs, who as a 20-year-old from western Illinois had joined the U.S. Army in 1860 and been sent to the frontier camp. Like many of those soldiers, he would never return home and would go on to be a settler in his own right.
Benjamin McCulloch’s brother Henry, a newly minted colonel of the Confederate Army, organized the First Regiment, Texas Mounted Riflemen to provide a line of defense for the Texas frontier. It did this for the first year of the war with a strategy of small, frequent patrols and small-scale skirmishes with Comanche bands. Company G of the regiment would occupy Camp Colorado until 1862, when military regulations prevented the regiment, depleted by Comanche attacks and desertions, from continuing in Confederate service. McCulloch formally withdrew his forces. The frontier regiment was reorganized as a militia of the state of Texas by governor Francis Lubbock and reinforced by the Texas Rangers.
A company of these forces under Captain JJ Callan took control of Camp Colorado, mostly consisting of the original Union soldiers stationed there before the war. These companies were spaced along the frontier within a day’s travel, and daily patrols between the camps occurred to track Comanche movements. Further reinforcements were provided by local settlers conscripted into the Confederate Army, and capturing draft dodgers became one of the tasks of the frontier companies. The vulnerability of the settlers and the small force manning the camps was immense, and they were one false step away from slaughter by the Comanche. One eyewitness account of a confrontation about 12 miles south of Camp Colorado shows this:
“During 1862, Lt. J. Chandler, in command of a squad of about ten men who belonged to Capt. J.J. Callan’s company . . . were scouting in the vicinity of Santa Anna Gap. Two men were stationed on the mountain as spies and the remainder near a water hole which lay to the north. The spies on the mountain discovered several [Comanche] in the far distance coming from the settlements with a large caballada of stolen horses and immediately reported to the remaining part of the command, stationed at the water hole.”
“Lt. Chandler and his men subsequently located themselves in the Santa Anna Gap where the present town of Santa Anna now stands. When the [Comanche] arrived, the whites made a sudden charge and the [Comanche] scattered like a covey of quail. One [Comanche] was killed and another thought to have been wounded. After Hog Marshall emptied his six shooter and fell back to where he considered his position safe, [a Comanche] shot an arrow high in the air and as it came down, accidentally found lodging in Hog Marshall’s hip.”
— The West Texas Frontier, by Joseph Carroll McConnell.
Despite the dangers, settlers continued to gradually push to the west. By the end of the war, Camp Colorado was no longer on the frontier line. It was never regarrisoned by the Union Army after the surrender of the Confederacy and was relegated to civilian use as the original seat of government of the newly organized Coleman County. Like so many members of the Union army who had been stationed at these far-flung frontier posts, most of the enlisted stayed near their original postings and became settlers themselves.
The Texas frontier was far removed from the battles of the Civil War, and its protection largely depended on the efforts of settlers and defected Union soldiers. Their efforts were uninterrupted regardless of the identity of the commanding officer or the government they nominally served. The frontier produced harsh conditions that made daily life a matter of life and death. To the people who were living there, the forces of history faded into the background.
