On November 8, 1860, the event dreaded in Texas happened; Lincoln secured sufficient electoral votes to win the Presidency. It was, as Houston predicted, a triumph of sectionalism over sectionalism, rather than a national victory. Lincoln was a minority President, by almost one million popular votes. He received 1,857,000; Douglas 1,365,976; Breckinridge 847,953; and Bell, the planters' choice, only 590,631. But Lincoln's victories were confined to only a few big states, all in the North. He would have carried all but two of them, Oregon and California, even if all his opponents' votes had been pooled. The startling, and dangerous, quality of this victory was that Lincoln got less than 100,000 votes outside the states he carried. He got none at all in Texas and in several other Southern states.
The American people, as such, elected no one in 1860; they had been divided into states versus states, and the big states won.
Breckinridge carried Texas, as expected, on the farmer vote: 47,548 to 15,463 for Bell. Bell represented the conservative Southern Unionist vote. He won only Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee.
Lincoln's party, because of the regional nature of his victory, failed to carry either house of Congress. The Republican President lacked eight of having a majority in the Senate, and twenty-one seats in the House. The evidence is that Mr. Lincoln was to be another futile, even tragic Tyler, Pierce, or Fillmore in the White House if the South merely kept its head. Lincoln was in no way responsible for the rupture that followed, though some blame must attach to him for not silencing or refuting the spokesmen like Seward, who attacked slavery and the South. Lincoln himself affirmed the Constitution, stated he had no powers or intentions to abolish slavery although he opposed it. But he was a Black Republican, a bogeyman, and the politicians of the South had already promised to secede, if he won, long before. Now, it was the "simon pure" Constitutionalist Democrats who scrapped the Constitution, raised rebellion, and forced Lincoln into a historic greatness he would have preferred to avoid.
Events went fast. South Carolina put secession in motion a week after the election. The nursery of nullification was the sire of secession. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina formally seceded from the United States. Other states of the old Gulf South followed. In Texas, enormous pressure was put on Houston to call a convention to discuss secession. He refused to act. However, the Party acted without him, and unconstitutionally, by calling a state convention. Houston at last agreed to call a special session of the legislature, which authorized a public election for convention delegates. By now five Southern states had seceded. Houston argued eloquently that the situation did not call for Texas to follow suit.
Houston, with supporters David Burnet, E. M. Pease, James W. Throckmorton, the Hancocks, Edmund J. Davis, and A. J. Hamilton, took the position that they deprecated Lincoln's success, but that the state must yield to the American Constitution. This position was eroded rapidly by attacks by both a majority of the political figures and the press. Unionism in Texas revolved around a number of prominent men, most of whom were not in public life; it simply had no mass base. Another problem was that Unionist sentiment was simply that neither the North nor its philosophy nor developing social ideas had an iota of planter support. This must be understood in the light of the immense turn, in the ensuing months, of the followers of Bell to reluctant support for the Confederacy, from Texas to Virginia. It became unthinkable for a Texan to side against his own people once Lincoln began to put down the rebellion, and the secessionist majority was at war.
The special convention to vote on secession was assembled at Austin during the last days of January 1861. It was apparent from preliminary maneuvers that secession was ascendant. Sam Houston attended the sessions, as an observer recognized by the chair; he attempted neither to support nor obstruct. Houston's tactic was to delay. The convention was chaired by Oran M. Roberts, a justice of the state supreme court and an ardent secessionist.
The actual balloting on passage of a secession ordinance came at high noon, February 1, 1861. There was an atmosphere of tension and drama, and the galleries of the convention hall were packed. One hundred seventy-four delegates, from the Red River to the Rio Grande, shouted "aye" or "no" as their names were polled.
Seventy delegates voted for secession before a single "no" was registered. The first negative vote brought down jeers and catcalls from the gallery.
Oldtime Whig James W. Throckmorton, of Collin County, rose and addressed the chair as his turn came. Throckmorton was a known Unionist. "Mr. President, in view of the responsibility, in the presence of God and my country—and unawed by the wild spirit of revolution around me, I vote 'no!'"
This brought a feeble cheer from the Unionist minority, which was drowned out in a wave of hissing. Throckmorton, a tall, immensely courageous politician wearing a short beard, said in a voice that could be heard in the farthest corner: "Mr. President, when the rabble hiss, well may patriots tremble!" Throckmorton sat down.
The convention almost dissolved in disorder; the galleries screamed abuse; the chair and the delegates themselves shouted the mob down. Very few people in the hall agreed with Throckmorton, but he was known as an honorable man. The balloting continued. At its end, only seven men from all Texas joined Throckmorton.
When the result was officially announced, thunderous cheers rocked the hall. A procession immediately started down the aisle, led by arch-secessionist George Flournoy; in its van, carried by several ladies, was a magnificent handmade Lone Star flag. This emblem was ceremonially raised to the place of honor over the platform, where the national flag was normally displayed. Outside the hall, Austin went wild as the news was carried about. Couriers rode at the gallop north, east, and south. In a burst of wild, popular enthusiasm, most Texans believed the day of deliverance from Northern evil had arrived. Everywhere militia companies gathered, shots were fired in the air, and bonfires lit.
Quietly, almost unnoticed, the handful who had voted against secession left the hall and had themselves photographed standing together for posterity. Sixty-six years were to pass before this photograph was to be printed or shown in Texas.
Sam Houston, who sat quietly, saying little, during this drama, now threw his whole weight into an attempt to have the ordinance voted down by the people. Its terms provided that Texas would become sovereign on March 2, 1861—twenty-five years after the first Texas declaration of independence—unless an open referendum turned the ordinance down.
The ordinance, together with a declaration of causes, was printed in 20,000 copies and distributed throughout the state. The six causes for Texas's secession are historically important; they revealed the dominant Texas mind. Even those men who opposed secession agreed with all, or some, of these statements. The "causes" were as follows:
The general government of the United States had administered the common territory so as to exclude Southern people from it (meaning, Congress had consistently barred or tried to bar slavery in the Western territories).
The disloyalty of the people of the North and the "imbecility" of their leadership had created incendiarism and outlawry in Kansas.
The Union had failed to defend Texas against both Mexican bandits and Indians.
The Northern people had become inimical to the South and to "their beneficent and patriarchical system of African slavery, preaching the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color."
The slaveholding states had become a minority, unable to defend themselves against northern aggression against slavery.
The extremists of the North had elected as President and Vice-President "two men whose chief claims to such high positions" were the approval of all the above wrongs, and these men were pledged to the final ruin of the slaveholding South.
In these weeks, there was a noticeable trend among the more conservative newspapers to support secession. The principal motive was emotional: submission to a Black Republican President, whose party had come to symbolize racial equality in the South, galled the Southern soul. The almost
universal confusion of questions of domination and subordination with manhood in such situations arose. Southern manhood would be degraded by enforced equality; true men would never submit. This feeling was not, historically, confined to the American South. It tended to exist everywhere, before and later, a master–inferior social complex arose, from South America to South Africa. The American North, opposing what was a basic human instinct with concepts of morality, never fully understood this, because the North did not live in the daily presence of a conquered, enforcedly servile race.
All evidence shows that then (and afterward) much Southern educated opinion felt that the Union was designed originally as a confederacy, in which sovereign states possessed an inherent right to come and go. Many of the men who opposed secession did not disbelieve in this right, considering it a basic freedom the people enjoyed. This feeling must be understood in order to understand the reason that the vast majority of the Texans who voted against secession, and believed the destruction of the Union was a mistake, eventually fought loyally for their native soil. Many of the great planters remained opposed to secession to the end; then, when it was inevitable, like ordinary citizens across Texas, they offered their services to the state.
Sam Houston, Throckmorton, and the small band of prominent Unionists mounted a "noble effort" to win the popular vote. This was hopeless. Ten predominantly German counties around Austin were carried for the Union, though Europeans in the more eastern regions of the state supported secession. Throckmorton seems to have been instrumental in getting eight north Texas counties to vote no; these counties contained many Upper South, or border state immigrants, as well as a few Yankees. But the heartland and the black belts of the coast and pine woods went overwhelmingly for secession, with only a few exceptions. The state-wide vote was 46,129 to 14,697, closely duplicating the Breckinridge-Bell vote.
Again, many landowners did not favor secession but could not influence the popular democracy in full tide. Arguments that secession was a strategic error were pallid against the emotionalism that gripped two-thirds of the people.
The special convention, which had been legalized by the legislature, was already acting to accept the surrender of federal forces in Texas before the vote was in. There were over 2,000 border garrison troops in the state; the surrender of these was eased by the fact that General Twiggs, in command, was a Georgian Southern sympathizer. Everywhere, over forts and government posts and agencies, the Stars and Stripes were torn down and the Lone Star emblem raised. Many federal officers, both civil and military, were Southern, and joined the movement.
With its popular mandate, independence was official March 2. The convention now authorized a Texas delegation to apply to the Confederacy, now organizing at Montgomery, Alabama, for admission to the new nation of Southern states. This was unnecessary. The Confederacy had already taken the step of admitting Texas, before the state applied.
There was some sentiment in Texas to stay aloof from the rest of the South, to go it alone as an independent state. But two things made this impossible for the old-time Texas settlers: the great influx from the Southern states in recent years, which carried ties of blood, and the fact that it was common knowledge that the Northern states were not going to permit the Union to dissolve peaceably, although this last notion had been much expounded by politicians. The Confederacy was from the first a defensive measure, and all deeply committed slave states felt compelled to join. Houston refused to try to obstruct the entrance into the Confederate States, on the grounds this would provoke civil conflict within the state.
Houston now faced his last two great decisions in public life: whether to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, as all state officers were now required to do, and whether to fight to retain his office under the U.S. Constitution. He did neither. He declined the oath to the Confederacy on the simple grounds it violated his oath to the United States. This caused the convention to remove him, on March 16, 1861, by declaring his office vacant and appointing Clark, the lieutenant governor, in his place.
President Lincoln, through a federal military officer, offered Houston the use of the U.S. Army to retain his office. Houston declined this firmly. Fort Sumter had not yet been fired on, and Houston was determined not to be the first to precipitate civil war. Houston now satisfied his own concepts of honor. He remained true to the Union; he sent a message protesting the illegality of his removal, and he retired to his home in Huntsville.
Houston faced the same dilemma thousands of Southerners who had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States faced. All were torn painfully between personal and professional honor, beliefs of right and wrong, and their deep sense of blood and soil. The agony of Robert E. Lee in these weeks is illuminating. Lee, a lieutenant colonel of the 2d Cavalry, met with Edmund J. Davis of Brownsville, a district court judge, in a small hotel off Main Plaza in San Antonio. Davis, a transplanted Floridian, told Lee that he was the ablest man in federal service, and begged him to stand by the Union, on both legal and emotional grounds. Davis was a Southerner who believed secession was suicidal. Colonel Lee, "superb, perfect, handsome, bronzed, and compact," as a Union-sympathizing observer wrote in his diary, showed visible anguish. He began to pace the room. Finally, he told the judge that his arguments were "correct and unanswerable." Secession was suicidal and meant certain disaster for the Southern people. But Lee said quietly that his higher loyalty must be to his own people, and to the state his family had served so long. He would go with Virginia.
Lee's demeanor and decision profoundly affected the Unionists in the room, who never forgot the scene.
Sam Houston chose both the American nation and Texas. He refused to violate his oath or to serve the Confederacy; he also refused to do anything to shed Texan blood. He reluctantly approved the decision of his eldest son to enlist in the Southern army, recognizing young Houston's own right of choice.
James W. Throckmorton, politically the bravest of the brave, fought secession to the last. Then, his own sense of duty compelled him to don Confederate gray. He eventually became a brigadier.
A great factor in this coming war was that it was not a true "civil" war in the ideological or social sense. America was still an imperfect nation, made up of strikingly different regions, with tremendously different outlooks. The war at bottom was regional, an outgrowth of the regional configuration of the Presidential election. Only in limited areas, mainly border states, was it a brother-against-brother conflict. What began as a rebellion against the federal apparatus turned into a war between two States. Significantly, men from Northern states without feelings either about slavery or the Union fought in the federal forces; the early resort of the Confederated States to conscription made the Southern effort "national" rather than ideological.
Thousands of Southerners had to choose between abstract principle and people; and to the Texan and Southern mind, soil and people were paramount. It was extremely difficult for Union-thinking Texans to stand for principle, because there was no real Unionist base in the South to make such a stand respectable. Inevitably, although only three out of four Texans voted for disunion, nine out of ten refused to support a cause carried on by "foreigners" in the North.
In retirement and isolation at Huntsville, Houston was a tragic figure. He did not live out the war. In these last years of his life, the mixed emotions all Texans felt toward their greatest hero tended to color his long career. He was a giant of the early American 19th century, who had outlived his time, and the full understanding of his countrymen.
Trying to assess Houston, the Texas historian Webb wrote he was "fully conscious of the possession of superior talents . . . bold and intelligent." But Walter Prescott Webb found it hard to like Houston. He was "a finished master of guile and deception."
Houston confused men; he had the politician's knack of listening attentively to everything brought before him, saying little, and always giving the impression he might go along with every argument. He had so little ideology, other tha
n a profound belief in the American nation and its destiny, that many people never knew where he stood on lesser issues. But in crisis, as Webb said, he was "a statesman, and never a scoundrel."
When Santa Anna was brought before him, and a blood-thirsty mob clamored for the Mexican's blood, Houston never thought of anything except to use the captive President for his country's advantage. When he dreamed huge dreams and plotted the explosion of the United States westward with Andrew Jackson, he found it expedient "not to let his right hand know what his left hand was about," and to "keep his own counsel." Let others believe what they wanted to believe; Sam Houston did what he thought was required.
He had no great faith in lesser men, and time and time again they justified
him fully. Yet, Houston held his own word and honor sacrosanct. No Texan ever inspired more confidence to men around him. He had monstrous ambitions; even as late as 1860, he had never given up hope of becoming President of the United States. Yet, he sacrificed ambition to honor many times, from the governorship of Tennessee to his nomination for President.
He was hard—rocklike on the battlefield—and he had in one way or another killed many men. But he had a streak of magnanimity broader than most Americans of his time. Few men ever showed less rancor for his former enemies, above all when they were at his feet.
He was a difficult man for even his own age to understand; genius always is. During the grim months of 1860, he posed as a new American Alexander, preparing to bring American civilization to Mexico at the point of a Texan sword. Houston was surely sincere in thinking Anglo-Saxon conquest would have been good for Mexico, and here he was by no means alone. But his actions in 1860 must be measured against his acts as President of Texas, when he almost singlehandedly damped a Texas-Mexican war. And when he tried to gather guns, ammunition, and Rangers to invade the south, Houston was scrupulous every step of the way to compromise neither the honor of his subordinates nor of the United States. Houston was the kind of man who could envision an appalling conflict between the states, and coldly choose to avert it by shedding Mexican blood instead. He was a patriot in the oldest, Roman, sense.
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