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Holly Discusses Southern Unionists During Civil War

In talking about Union sympathizers in South during the Civil War, Peggy Holly, professor of History at Austin Community College, in her talk to the Discussion Interest Group March 25 at the Yarborough Branch Library stressed the significance of the loss of the four border states, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware to the Confederacy.

In opting not to leave the Union these four slave states deprived the Confederacy of potential manpower and industrial strength.  According to Holly, 37% of Southern manpower resided in the Border States, and had they joined the Confederate States the South's industrial capacity would have been doubled. They also contained 50 % of Southern urbanization. Only New Orleans was a bigger Southern city than St. Louis or Baltimore

The main thrust of her talk, however, dealt with Texas during the Civil War crisis.  Sam Houston was governor of Texas in 1860 and he was strongly opposed to Texas seceding. Holly quoted him as predicting that a long and costly war would result from secession. Ignoring Houston's warnings, a Secession Convention voted 166 to 8 on February 1, 1861 to leave the Union. This vote was later ratified by a state-wide referendum by a vote of 46,153 to 14,747. Even though this was an overwhelming vote, Ms Holly pointed out it meant that one-third of Texans did not wish to join the Confederacy.  In fact, she said, eighteen counties (out of 122) voted not to secede, mostly along the Red River and in Central Texas.

Despite seemingly vast Confederate sympathies in the State, Holly noted that Texas raised two Union regiments, one commanded by Edmund J. Davis and the other by Andrew Jackson Hamilton, brother of Morgan Hamilton for whom Hamilton Pool is named.  Other prominent Texans opposed to secession were David Burnet, namesake of Burnet Road, and former governor Elisha Pease.

Union sentiment was especially strong among the German immigrants of the Hill Country, Holly said, and in 1862 a group of approximately 65 men attempting to immigrate to Mexico to avoid the conflict were intercepted by Confederates at the Nueces River and most were killed during the resulting battle. A member of the audience, Hubert Heinan, RFSA member and retired professor of Germanic Studies, told the group that his great-grandmother's brother was among those killed in that massacre. After the War the bones of the dead were gathered and buried in Comfort where a monument was erected in their honor.

The only other Union monument in Texas is in Gainesville, Holly related. After a period of unrest in the Red River Counties that has seen a recent influx of settlers from Tennessee and Kentucky the nervous Texans arrested 150 people suspected of Union sympathies. The result was the "Great Hanging at Gainesville" in 1862 when 40 men were hanged.