Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
On Jan. 1, 1863 – the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation – a Massachusetts private named Alexander Hobbs recorded these words in his journal: "I have now to chronicle an event which will be remembered by us all while we live." But Hobbs was not referring to emancipation. He wrote instead of a New Year's Day battle in Texas and a story of captivity that revealed how fragile freedom could be, even after Lincoln's proclamation.
Alexander Hobbs's journey into the Confederacy was atypical. Having joined the newly formed 42nd Massachusetts Volunteers – a "nine-month regiment" – in late 1862, he traveled south by water instead of by land. After sailing on multiple transports and skirting the coast at Key West, Fla., his regiment arrived at New Orleans on Dec. 17, 1862.
The unit's officers presumed they would aid in the federal occupation at New Orleans, or assist in ongoing campaigns to open the Mississippi River. But only days after they arrived, part of the regiment was ordered to Galveston, Tex., which Union forces had occupied since October. Hobbs boarded another ship and left for the Lone Star State four days before Christmas.
Three companies of the 42nd Massachusetts soon settled at Kuhn's Wharf on Galveston Island, a position that Hobbs worried was too exposed. Local townspeople "could destroy us in a few minutes from the streets by a well directed fire," Hobbs wrote on Dec. 28. "We are obliged to sleep on our arms which is extremely disagreeable." The soldiers spent the final days of 1862 patrolling the city, constructing breastworks and interacting with civilians.
Hobbs had been on active service for less than a month, yet he was about to participate in his only battle of the war. On Jan. 1, 1863, the Confederate general John B. Magruder unleashed a surprise attack against the Union garrison. Nearly 2,000 Confederate troops stormed Galveston Island while artillerymen shelled Union barricades and barracks. "The cries of the wounded," the splintering of buildings, and the bombs bursting in air, Hobbs wrote, "is something that requires a smarter pen than mine to describe."
Although woefully outnumbered, the Union infantry managed to repulse several assaults, nearly foiling Magruder's plans. But then, two Confederate "cottonclads" – gunboats whose machinery and boilers were shielded by stacks of cotton bales – entered the harbor. Six United States warships were also present, but the Confederates laid down a strong fire to clear the decks of the Harriet Lane, and Magruder's men climbed aboard, forcing the crew to surrender. After another Union ship ran aground, the remaining warships fled for New Orleans. Soldiers in the 42nd Massachusetts were left stranded on the wharf and soon gave up the fight.
Hobbs, now a prisoner of war, was transported by train to Houston. His soldiering experience had ended almost as quickly as it began, yet in its brief two-month span, he had seen many aspects of the war – traveling to the Deep South, witnessing Union occupation, participating in a battle and enduring capture. And in Houston, Hobbs would also see and comment on the institution at the heart of the war – slavery.
In entries written immediately after his capture, Hobbs expressed surprise that "the people treated us kindly" in Houston. But Houstonians were not so polite to the few African-Americans also captured in Galveston. Although Hobbs never mentioned them before the battle, black men were serving aboard the Harriet Lane and other Union vessels. And when Hobbs arrived in Houston, one local newspaper noticed "several negroes" among the prisoners, including one in shackles and one "in sailor's uniform" who was jeered at by locals.
African-Americans were hardly a rare sight in the Union Navy. Officials recruited black seamen from the beginning of the war, and by war's end, nearly 20 percent of the Navy's enlisted men were black. Many, but not all, were "contrabands" – slaves who had escaped to Union blockading ships. Later in January, for example, when Confederates attacked another Union ship off the Texas coast, they captured "29 negroes, nearly all of which are contrabands."
These black sailors and runaways had far more reason than Hobbs to fear capture in Texas, a state with around 200,000 slaves. Confederates may have treated Hobbs kindly, but their views on slavery were diametrically opposed to his. The Texas Declaration of Causes for Secession asserted that "the servitude of the African race" was the "will of the Almighty Creator," and white Texans intended that it "should exist in all future time." Hobbs recorded his opposite view on Jan. 4: "I honestly believe thare will be more slaves found in Heaven than Southerners."
Hobbs's "hatred to the institution of slavery" deepened later that month, when he wrote that "six coulered men have been taken away to prison, four of them belonging to the Harriet Lane" and two of them connected to his regiment. All "but one or two were free born," he reported, but now, he believed, they were all "to be sold."
A letter preserved in the Texas State Library and Archives confirms the gist of Hobbs's story. In February 1863, a state agent named Henry Perkins wrote the legislature that he had taken the "negroes" who "were captured … in Galveston" to the penitentiary at Huntsville, where they were "now at work for the state." By that time, Hobbs was about to be paroled and already traveling to Union lines – illustrating the stark contrast between his captivity and that of the "six coulered men." While Hobbs rejoiced in the "prospect of speedy deliverance," these less fortunate men disappeared into the penitentiary, despite Perkins's admission that all six were "claiming to be free."
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These claims meant little under Texas laws that virtually equated being black with being enslaved. Still, Perkins's letter acknowledged that the state's laws governing runaway slaves "never contemplated" dealing with men like these. The law, which stated that captured runaways were to be held for six months after arrest and then taken to the penitentiary, needed to be "so altered as to the meet the exigency of the times. For we know not how soon we may have a Brigade of Negroes of like character." Indeed, 22 other recently captured "negroes" were "slaves … claiming to be free," according to Perkins. When should they go to the penitentiary in Huntsville? Perkins wanted the legislature to clarify the matter.
Austin obliged the next month with a new law. It declared that any person of color who entered the state "with any armed force of the enemy" would thereby "have forfeited his freedom, if he be free," and would labor in the penitentiary until one year after any peace treaty. After that, any prisoner of color who had not been claimed as a runaway would be sold at auction "to the highest bidder."
Few laws better illustrated the confidence of white Texans that slavery would survive the war – or better foreshadowed the mechanisms they would use to continue coercing black labor long after the fighting ended. On the same day, the state passed other laws expanding manufacturing operations at the penitentiary, where many black prisoners would later be leased as cheap laborers.
In the meantime, the divergent experiences of Hobbs and the "six coulered men" taken to Huntsville vividly illustrate how much the force of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation depended on the fortunes of Union arms. Later in 1863, another Union attempt to invade Texas at Sabine Pass was also repulsed, ensuring that slave labor in the Lone Star State would survive to the end. In its place, white Texans would develop new forms of penal servitude and "convict leasing" that had begun during the war and soon took root in many parts of the postbellum South – creating a system that the historian Douglas A. Blackmon has described as "slavery by another name."
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Sources: "Charles P. Bosson, "History of the Forty-Second Regiment Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862, 1863, 1864"; Randolph B. Campbell, "Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State" and "An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865"; Edward T. Cotham Jr., "Battle on the Bay: The Civil War Struggle for Galveston"; James G. Hollandsworth Jr., "Nine-Months Men at Port Hudson: Did They Make a Difference?" Louisiana History 46 (Winter, 2005); Andrew Lang, "The Civil War Through Contemporary Accounts: The Diary of Alexander Hobbs"; Texas Declaration of Causes for Secession, Feb. 2, 1861; Douglas A. Blackmon, "Slavery by Another Name"; Alexander Hobbs Diary, 1862-1863, MS 370, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University; "Dick Dowling and Sabine Pass in History and Memory"; Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, Jan. 7 and Jan. 28, 1863; "Letter from Henry E. Perkins to the Texas Legislature, Feb. 13, 1863, Texas State Library and Archives Commission."
Andrew F. Lang is a doctoral candidate at Rice University, where he is completing his dissertation on the problem of military occupation in Civil War America.
W. Caleb McDaniel is an assistant professor of history at Rice and the author of "The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform."
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