Galveston and the Civil War: An Island City in the Maelstrom

By James M Schmidt

One of the oldest cities in Texas, Galveston has witnessed more than its share of tragedies. Devastating hurricanes, yellow fever epidemics, fires, a major Civil War battle and more cast a dark shroud on the city's legacy. Ghostly tales creep throughout the history of famous tourist attractions and historical homes. The altruistic spirit of a schoolteacher who heroically pulled victims from the floodwaters during the great hurricane of 1900 roams the Strand. The ghosts of Civil War soldiers march up and down the stairs at night and pace in front of the antebellum Rogers Building. The spirit of an unlucky man decapitated by an oncoming train haunts the railroad museum, moving objects and crying in the night. Kathleen Shanahan Maca explores these and other haunted tales from the Oleander City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781614236887

James M Schmidt

James Schmidt is a member of the Galveston Historical Foundation, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, and the Woodlands area Civil War Round Table. He is the author of three other Civil War titles and the Civil War Medicine (and Writing) blog.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The city of Galveston in times of peace is one of the most beautiful places in the south…I know of no place in the South that I would prefer to this.

—Private Harvey C. Medford, Lane’s Texas Cavalry, C.S.A.

Diary entry, March 11, 1864

When it comes to my appreciation for Galveston, Texas, I feel a kinship with the sentiment of Confederate soldier H.C. Medford. My first trips to Galveston were as a youth when I lived in nearby Houston, and my parents took our family to the beach. Having lived until then in the landlocked states of Kansas and Missouri, my attention was directed to the expansive and fascinating Gulf of Mexico, the sea wall, hermit crabs, collecting shells and swimming. Little did I know that my future attention would be with the lovely city behind me and its equally expansive and fascinating history.

The story of Galveston and the Civil War stretches back to the early 1800s when the island was a base for pirates and privateers engaged in the illegal slave trade. On the eve of the Civil War, the Island City was a jewel of the Gulf Coast: a booming city with a fine natural harbor and all the commerce, culture and improvements that attended to it—sail and rope merchants, foundries, cotton warehouses, newspapers, hotels, churches, schools, hospitals, gas lighting, a railroad to the mainland and more. The city was also a hotbed of secessionist sentiment, and some of its foremost citizens would help lead Texas out of the Union and into the Civil War.

From then, the story of Galveston in the Civil War might be thought of in terms of bookends: the cruelties of bondage and the promise of liberation for the city’s enslaved African Americans; exuberance as its favorite sons marched gaily off to a war all thought would be short and weariness after four years of bloodshed; the stranglehold of the Union blockade and the excitement of intrepid seamen running the gauntlet into its port; a short-lived Union occupation and a longer time as an entrenched camp in Confederate hands. The climax was the Battle of Galveston: a short, intense and even strange battle of errors, coincidences and heroism—on both sides—on New Year’s Day 1863.

The story lives on to this day due to excellent private and public efforts to preserve Galveston’s history: above ground, in its wartime homes and buildings; below ground, in its historic cemeteries with equally historic personalities; and below the water, as the wrecks of warships and blockade runners are discovered and preserved. A walk in the streets of Galveston is truly a walk back in time owing to the efforts that have allowed generations past and present to enjoy the Island City’s rich legacy.

In writing this book about the interesting and important role of Galveston in the Civil War, I have tried to fulfill Samuel Johnson’s admonition that The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new. To that end, I had three important goals: first, to provide readers with a lively and well-illustrated account of Galveston and the Civil War; second, to add to the scholarship on the subject by addressing subjects that have received little or no attention in previous accounts, including slavery, Unionist dissent, the heroic role of Galveston’s Ursuline sisters and the scourge of yellow fever (which took many more lives, soldier and civilian, than any battles on and near the island); and third, and most important, to add new voices to the existing literature on Galveston and the Civil War by including previously unpublished primary source material. My success in any or all of these goals I happily leave to the opinion of the reader.

To achieve these goals, I received the kind, enthusiastic and expert cooperation and support of many people. They include Casey Greene, head of special collections, and Carol Wood, archivist, at the Galveston and Texas History Center, Galveston, Texas; Sister Rosemary Meiman, O.S.U., provincial archivist for the Ursuline Sisters, St. Louis, Missouri; and archivists and staff at the following institutions: Pearce Museum’s Civil War Collection, Navarro College, Corsicana, Texas; Archives of the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana; Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Texas General Land Office, Austin, Texas; Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, St. Louis, Missouri; Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, Texas; Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland; and the always helpful reference staff of my hometown Montgomery County (Texas) Memorial Library, especially Ms. Patricia Bicknell.

Others who provided assistance include expert cartographer Steven Stanley, who prepared the map for this study; historical marker expert Craig Swain, who kindly provided his photograph of the Nuns of the Battlefield monument in Washington, D.C.; Jami Durham, Galveston Historical Foundation; author and historian Robert Moore, who reviewed my chapter on Unionist dissent in Galveston; Guy R. Hasegawa—friend, author, historian and expert editor—who applied his sharp eye and pencil to the manuscript; and Becky LeJeune, my editor at The History Press, who saw merit in this project and championed its publication.

Two special men deserve equally special mention: Edward T. Cotham Jr. and Andrew W. Hall are both esteemed authors and historians on this subject; they are also committed preservationists of the role of Galveston in the Civil War. Both were generous with their knowledge, advice, support and encouragement. They give true meaning to the phrase gentleman and a scholar. I could not have written this book without their assistance.

Likewise, I could not have accomplished this without my friends and family, especially my wife and children; their interest, support and encouragement is always appreciated.

The dedication to my parents is sincere and fitting. My Volga German ancestors arrived in western Kansas in the mid-1870s. My parents shared their knowledge of our heritage—genealogy, traditions, food, dance, faith, language and more—with us. It really made an impression on me, and I have long appreciated that important influence from which my own interest in history was most certainly born.

Despite all this help and inspiration, any errors in editing, fact or interpretation are mine alone.

To be sure, this book is not the first word on the story of Galveston and the Civil War, nor do I hope it will be the last. Readers interested in exploring new or special threads of interest and perhaps making their own contributions to the scholarship and literature on this subject will find an interactive bibliography—with hyperlinks to the full text of period documents, when possible—at http://civilwarmed.blogspot.com/p/galveston-and-civil-war-bibliography.html.

Map by Steven Stanley.

Chapter 1

Bondage

NEGROES—Have now 25 on hand and a portion choice No. 1 negroes. Field hands and house servants…The negroes are all sent out of town every night and exhibited next day before our door. We sell at auction or private sale as may be for the interest of our friends.

—J.S. & J.B. SYDNOR

Galveston Daily News, November 20, 1860

This Galveston is getting to be a notorious place, George Fellows wrote his friend Jesse Sawyer, a fellow abolitionist, in October 1844. Sometime before, Fellows had witnessed the Reverend James Huckins—minister of the island’s First Baptist Church, of which Fellows was a founding member—beating his female slave. Fellows confided to Sawyer that he could no longer go to the church, as he could not listen to preaching, with profit, where the remembrances of the sound of the sighs and groans of the slave of Mr. Huckins will ring in my ears." He added:

Yesterday I was called upon by Mr. Huckins to answer in regard to some remarks of mine in regard to his whipping his woman slave and whether I had practiced [and] intended to continue to inquire of a servant when they came where I was…and whether I thought it right to listen and believe what servants said. I told him that servants were to be believed sometimes as well as white folk.

Sometimes, dear brother, I wish you were here to preach us plainly the way of life on Salvation. But, Dear Brother, if like me you should yield to nature’s feelings in burst of indignation at the recital of cruelty and oppression because man does not love his brother as himself…in this land of vice and Sabbath breaking [it] would ruin your influence as a minister forever. Though here the life of a minister of Christ is consistent if he does not get drunk and whip his slave too much; he can preach the truth plainly without fear if he does not touch slavery. As a private or public subject that must not be touched in any form.

To give an idea of these people: Mr. Andrews, a lawyer, who had resided at Houston several years by the influence of Mr. Eliot, the British Minister to the Texas Republic, came to this place to hold a discussion on the subject of slavery. But he was placed in a boat and conveyed to the mainland to hunt for himself. Another man, still a slaveholder, was threatened with the same fate if he opened his mouth on the subject. So you can perceive the utter dislike of these people to hear anything on the subject.

A short time ago a mob took a Negro from jail by force and hung him because some of the other citizens wanted him to have a fair trial by the course of law, but was hung by them ten hours after taken. Though a very bad Negro, yet I doubt whether he intended the crime for which he was hung.

Dear Brother…Have wished you here many a time to labor to build up, if twas the Lord’s will, our little Baptist Church (though I am not a member and don’t expect to be while Mr. Huckins is here as minister or teacher). You could do but little good now as he has old enmity against you. He would wish to domineer and control you or else spoil your influence by charging you of being, or having been, an Abolitionist, which would injure your influence and happiness. Though you might catch him pursuing his slave with a badger club or big stick, yet this, a slave holding world, would approve because the law did, and condemn you as a suspected Abolitionist.

May Heaven direct you, and if we should meet on Earth no more, may we meet where Slavery, Sin, Sorrow and Death are known and felt no more.¹

In a single letter, George Fellows managed to touch on a number of points related to slavery in antebellum Galveston: the treatment of slaves, divisions in the churches, the behavior of masters, jurisprudence, the hard opinions against abolitionists and more. Some historians’ claims that slaves had never been a major factor in Galveston’s economy so the issue of slavery was more emotional than real or that slaves loved the Island life and were always loathe to leave it bely the facts: the island was a busy center of the illicit foreign slave trade, had a slave population whose growth outpaced that of its free population, was home to the largest slave market west of New Orleans and was witness to all the cruelties that attended the institution. It was also the single most important reason that Galvestonians would vote overwhelmingly to leave the Union.²

FREEBOOTERS AND SMUGGLERS

Slavery in Galveston can be traced back to the first permanent settlements on the island in the early 1800s by privateer Louis-Michel Aury and the Lafitte pirate family. Aury, born in France, established a base in Galveston in September 1816 under the auspices of the nascent Republic of Mexico. The settlement—which quickly attracted hundreds of recruits—was intended to serve as a base of operations against Spanish interests in Mexico and on the high seas. Aury had previously perfected his slave-smuggling practice in Spanish Florida; within a year of settling in Galveston, his crews took more than six hundred Africans from captured ships. Aury’s men built barracks to house their human prizes until they could be smuggled into Louisiana and sold into slavery.

Aury abandoned Galveston in 1817 and returned to Florida; into the brief vacuum of power stepped the pirates Antoine, Pierre and Jean Lafitte, who would establish a highly successful slave-smuggling operation on the island. Details of their early years—even their places of birth—are scant, but by the early 1800s, the brothers were using Barataria Bay and New Orleans as a base for their wine import and blacksmith businesses. These legitimate enterprises were only a front for their empire in brokering the sale of smuggled and captured goods. They used the profits from the smuggling operations to outfit their own ships and—recognizing the still greater profits to be reaped—they engaged in the illegal slave trade.

The Lafittes transferred their operation to Galveston in early 1817 to avoid the increasing enforcement of United States laws against the illegal slave trade. Their operation consisted of slave barracks, hundreds of traffickers in their employ, a mansion and a