Francis Lubbock

As Confederate governor of Texas, Lubbock argued for the prime necessity of preserving slavery and defeating attempts by Lincoln to “Africanise the Southern Confederacy” through emancipation. In fact, in February 1863, he urged the state legislature to send a resolution to Confederate Congress urging it to adopt an amendment to the Constitution forbidding the admission of any free state and preventing any current state from abolishing slavery.¹

At the regular session of the Ninth Legislature, Lubbock argued that the exigencies of war called on “the swarms of men engaged in profitable business on their own accounts” instead of in military service, or occupied in “driving teams and cattle for the government and government contractors” needed to be “replaced with Negroes” so the white men could fight. He also warned that “there a very large number who appear to be entirely devoted to the wild hunt of wealth,” a “mania” that made him “blush” because of the high prices it created.²