20140116 - Unionism Symposium Thoughts

This April, I’ll be giving a paper in a symposium in San Marcos on Lone Star Unionism & Dissent. Here’s the abstract I submitted:

As Union armies occupied New Orleans and moved up the Mississippi River in late 1862 and 1863, slaveholding refugees from Louisiana poured across the border into Texas, bringing with them tens of thousands of enslaved people. As these slaveholders rented land, hired out slaves, moved back and forth across the border, and sometimes straddled the line between commitment to the Confederacy and grudging acceptance of Union gains, their presence created tensions with many native Texans who questioned their loyalty or feared the influx of “strange” people of color. As “outsiders” who were neither Unionists nor fully accepted by Confederate Texans, these refugees and the enslaved people they brought with them did not always fit neatly into the categories historians have used to understand wartime Texas. They reveal the heterogeneous and shifting nature of the state’s population as well as the multiple motives—economic, practical, familial, and ideological—that brought many strangers to Texas during the War.

My contribution looks like it will be a little bit of an outlier in that the people I’m looking at were generally not “dissenters” or anti-Confederates. What I want to do in the paper is raise questions about the dominant categories we use to talk about Civil War Texans, and particularly about perspectives that see the question of whether someone was a “disloyal Unionist” or a “loyal Confederate” as a zero-sum question. Many contemporaries, I’ll argue, better fit one formerly enslaved woman’s description of her Louisiana owner, who “wasn’t in favor of the Confederates or the Yankees … he was in favor of himself.”1

The dichotomous view of wartime Texans as either loyal Confederates or Unionist dissenters dates back, and owes much, to the view of Confederate Texans themselves, who tended to view anyone who was not a diehard, sacrificing Confederate as a likely Unionist and traitor to the cause.

More recent scholarship, some of which looks like it will be shared and expanded at this symposium, on Civil War Texas has moved in two different directions:

  1. One stream has uncovered the stories of committed Unionists in Texas and redescribed many of them not as venal traitors but as principled opponents of the Confederate cause. But it remains important—perhaps especially in light of this scholarship—to continue questioning the contemporary logic that equated any activity which seemed to show a slackening of commitment to the Confederacy with a quickening of support for the Union.

  2. Literature on internal conflict and collapse in the Confederacy, exemplified in the case of the Trans-Mississippi Department by books like kerby1972 and marten1990, do a good job at resisting that equation by showing the growth, over the course of the war, of many demoralized citizens who, while certainly not principled Unionists or anti-secessionists at the beginning of the war, nonetheless undermined the Confederate war effort. That is, this literature has shown that one did not need to be a Unionist to weaken the Confederacy from within, and that there were many such “dissenters” or demoralized citizens on the homefront.

I’ve been thinking recently about where these streams of scholarship have led us, and I think basically they have encouraged us to place most actors in the Trans-Mississippi in one of three boxes: loyal Confederate, loyal American, or self-interested independent whose lack of Confederate patriotism weakened the Confederacy as much as full-throated American patriotism would have.

What this spectrum misses—if it is an accurate representation of the scholarship—are (a) those who changed over time and (b) those who favored the Confederacy but also wanted primarily to use its political project to advance their individual economic interests.2 In missing the (b) point we may also have neglected the way that Confederate state projects in Texas and Louisiana, far from being undermined by self-interested economic decisions that took purported disloyalists and demoralized citizens away from the battlefield, actively encouraged such decisions in some cases.

Many of the people who made such decisions were the Refugees to Texas who were considered “Unionists” or suspect by native Texans. These “phantom Unionists” in fact favored Confederate victory and did not see themselves as Unionist in any way, but the kernel of truth in suspicions about them is that they were concerned first and foremost with making use of the opportunities afforded by Confederate laws and policies to hedge the losses to their fortunes caused by federal policies and laws.3

I’m still thinking through how to say all of this more clearly, but in general what I’m hoping to do is use a few mini-biographies, perhaps of people like Samuel Q. Richardson and William F. Weeks, to stress the inadequacy of the Confederate-or-Unionist dilemma for capturing the experiences and choices of Texans and recent arrivals in Texas whose actions were often for themselves (without thereby necessarily being anti-Confederate or pro-Union).


  1. Quoted in sacher2007, p. 151.

  2. The “if” here is important; I need to review the literature more closely and make sure I’m not mispresenting it, and welcome suggestions about what to read.

  3. Here I think I’m somewhat following Chandra Manning’s depiction of Confederate patriotism as often “self-interested,” though she—like other historians of this dimension of Confederate nationalism—is most concerned with showing its impact on demoralization and Confederate defeat.