Texas Newspapers Report the Battle of Gettysburg and the Fall of Vicksburg

An illustration depicting part of the Battle of Gettysburg from Harper's Weekly, August 8, 1863. (This newspaper is not in the collections of the DRT Library.)

Many historians have labeled the Battle of Gettysburg, together with the fall of Vicksburg, as the major turning point of the Civil War. This assertion remains under dispute, as scholars and other experts on the conflict have offered alternative events and battles as possible turning points. Moreover, primary sources written during the war indicate that many people – lacking scholars’ hindsight and ability to see the implications of an event – did not necessarily identify the outcomes at Gettysburg and Vicksburg as turning points.

A scene from the siege of Vicksburg from Harper's Weekly, July 25, 1863. (This newspaper is not in the collection of the DRT Library.)

Indeed, editions of the Austin Tri-Weekly State Gazette from July 14 to July 30, 1863, in the collections of the DRT Library demonstrate that news of the battles traveled slowly to Texas, as reports published in eastern newspapers were reprinted in papers further west. When information finally did reach Texas, much of it was conflicting and inconsistent. As the newspaper’s editor admitted on July 18, a full two weeks after the battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, “the dispatches we have been receiving lately are so contradictory and confused that that we must leave our readers to draw their own conclusions.”

Front page of the Austin Tri-Weekly State Gazette from July 14, 1863.

As late as July 14, D. Richardson, the editor of the Gazette, argued that “from a careful perusal of all the dispatches, we are led to the conclusion” that news of the fall of Vicksburg “cannot be true.” Still, he notes, “it behooves us to prepare for the worst.” This arrived two days later when Richardson was forced to admit that he had received “full confirmation” of Vicksburg’s fall. Still, doubters remained, as the Gazette noted on July 21 that “notwithstanding the apparently well authenticated reports we have had of the fall of Vicksburg, there are many in this city who still have doubts on the subject.”

Some information published in the Gazette ultimately proved to be grossly incorrect. Throughout the latter part of July, the newspaper reported stunning Southern victories in Washington, D. C. and other northern cities:

• On July 23, “The news from Lee’s army is glorious – better than we at first anticipated. We have now every assurance that the news before published was true, and that both Harrisburg [the state capital of Pennsylvania] and Washington City are in our hands, with an immense number of prisoners.”

• On July 25, “The News says Johnston telegraphed Col. Carpenter at Natchez, that beyond a doubt Gen. Lee now occupied Washington City.”

• And on July 28, “The [Houston] Telegraph is in receipt of Northern papers as late as the 11th…the general impression everywhere seems to be that all the accounts of Lee’s victories are reliable, and that our successes in the North, so far as heard from already, are a full off for the loss of Vicksburg.”

During this same period, the Battle of Gettysburg appears to have been mentioned only once, in an article on July 18 stating “from Richmond we learn that a fight took place at Gettysburg on the 1st in which our losses are reported enormously heavy. It is said to have been a drawn battle. The battle reported in our last, at which Lee captured 40,000 prisoners[,] took place on the 4th at Martinsburg. It is somewhat singular we should have heard nothing at the time of the battle of Gettysburg.”

Front page of the Austin Tri-Weekly State Gazette, July 30, 1863. This edition of the newspaper also reported the death of General Sam Houston.

It wasn’t until July 30, almost a month after Lee was defeated at Gettysburg, that Texans learned of the loss. The newspaper reported that the Houston Telegraph “copies two official dispatches from Gen. Meade, who was in command at Gettysburg, which will be found below, showing that the fight there was not in our favor as first stated.” At the same time, Texans found that their exuberance over the fall of Washington D. C. and the capture of Memphis was unfounded. “It is evident,” reported the Gazette, trying for a cheerful tone, “that we have been ‘most delightfully humbugged,’ as the [Houston] Telelgraph says, in relation to the capture of Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia.”

Front page of the Austin Tri-Weekly State Gazette, July 16, 1863.

Front page of the Austin Tri-Weekly State Gazette, July 21, 1863.

While reports of far-away battles consumed the front page of the Gazette throughout July 1863, the newspaper also carried stories about events closer to home. Almost all of this news related to the war effort, showing glimpses of life on the Texas homefront during the Civil War. Such news included casualty lists; rewards for deserters from the Confederate army; notices seeking assistance for destitute families of Confederate soldiers; articles about the impressment of cotton, tax regulations, and elections; and notices describing runaway slaves, slave auctions, and ordinances governing the behavior of slaves and free African Americans.

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Historic Texas Taxes

This receipt shows that Thomas W. Grayson owed $16.25 in state and county taxes for 1852. Grayson's taxable property included 660 acres on Salado Creek in Bexar County, two "negros," thirty-five head of cattle, one wagon, and one carriage.

While filling out tax forms can at times be tedious and frustrating work, future scholars may very well find information in these records that will help them examine and understand everyday life in early twenty-first century America. Indeed, historians and genealogists find that preserved tax records such as receipts and rolls – along with other financial records like ledgers and account books – can be gold mines of information about people living in the past. Tax records can help family historians locate an ancestor who cannot be found in other sources. Moreover, tax records often include additional information besides the amount of tax owed by the taxpayer; such details can be used to determine, for example, birth, marriage, and death dates; conditions of servitude; parentage; and the migration of individuals and families from place to place. Tax records sometimes even fill in for other primary sources that were never created or that have not survived to the present day. For example, no census exists for the Republic of Texas for 1840; however, using tax rolls and other archival documents, Gifford White was able to compile a substitute list of citizens for that year. (This source is available at the DRT Library.)

 

Confederate tax receipts for James Lincoln showing money due in 1862 and 1863. The taxes had to be paid in Confederate treasury notes; their value collapsed during the course of the Civil War, and at the end of the conflict they became worthless.

Many archival collections at the DRT Library contain tax records. This is particularly true of collections created by individuals and members of families, as many of these collections contain nineteenth-century receipts for state, county, school, and poll taxes paid. Some collections include receipts for taxes paid to the Confederate States of America during the Civil War (1861-1865). Additionally, the DRT 9 Documents Collection contains tax records dating back to the seventeenth century. In addition to the documents shown below, DRT 9 includes a 1677 letter in which Spanish viceroy (the royal official who governed New Spain in the name of and as representative of the monarch) Enriquez de Rivera acknowledges a judicial appointment and an investigation of tax rolls; a 1713 letter in which viceroy Lencastre Norona y Silva transmits a royal decree regarding the collection of taxes; and an 1803 broadside published in Mexico City concerning the payment of taxes imposed to finance Spain’s war with England.

The first page of a decree - published in Mexico City on March 29, 1759 - demanding an accounting of the taxation of Indian women.

A receipt dated Mexico City, January 30, 1796, showing that Jose de Espinosa paid the required taxes for street improvements.

 Finally, materials in the library’s collections reveal that frustration about taxes is nothing new. Sentiments of dissatisfaction, disagreement, and apprehension are most succinctly and directly summarized in the title of Byron C. Utecht’s 1949 book, “The State of Texas or the State of Taxes?” The below cartoon by Hal Coffman, which originally appeared in the Fort Worth ­Star-Telegram, was included in the front of this work to visually depict Utecht’s argument about the predicament of Texas taxpayers.

Hal Coffman's 1949 illustration, "Just One Thing After Another."

For more information about using tax records in historical or genealogical research, check out these online resources:

“Taxes: One of Life’s Certainties” from Archival Chronicle (March 2009), available online through the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University. This article includes a list of common types of auditor’s records and a tax glossary.

“Income Tax Records of the Civil War Years” by Cynthia G. Fox, published in the National Archives and Records Administration’s Prologue Magazine (Winter 1986). This article debunks a common belief that the sixteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913, resulted in Americans paying income tax for the first time.

“Tax Records” from For the Record (May/June 1995), available through Ancestry.com.

“The Tax Man Cometh…and He Leaveth Records!” from The Ancestry Daily News (April 12, 2001), available through Ancestry.com

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Texas Secession, Continued

Main Plaza in San Antonio. This photograph is captioned "Texas troops at San Antonio at the time of the surrender of the U.S. arms." (SC11484C)

In last week’s post, we presented some documents in the library’s collections relating to the actions taken by Texans in February 1861 to secede from the union. Meanwhile, members of the Committee of Public Safety, assembled by the state’s secession convention, also worked to move their state toward allegiance with the Confederacy.

Dismissed from the U.S. army due to his surrender to McCulloch, Twiggs joined the Confederate army in May 1861. (SC96.381)

According to historian Walter L. Buenger, when General David E. Twiggs, commander of the Department of Texas, “appeared ready to resign, the [Committee of Public Safety] ordered General Ben McCulloch and his men to enter San Antonio rather than wait and deal with Twiggs’s successor, who was less favorably inclined to the South.” On February 16, 1861, Twiggs agreed to surrender between 1.3 and “three million dollars’ worth of federal stores to Texas” and to evacuate all federal troops in the state (154), which included 160 men in San Antonio and 2,700 soldiers (or approximately fifteen percent of the entire pre-war U.S. army) scattered in forts across Texas.

One unit that participated in the surrender of federal supplies and troops was the Alamo City Guards, a local militia company comprised of volunteers from the San Antonio area that was formed in 1859. Captain William M. Edgar, commander of the unit, recorded what happened once the Texans accepted Twiggs’s surrender:

…as I with my command was placed in charge of the Alamo, this flag was hoisted and remained on the Alamo building for some time and in recognition of the Secession of the State [and] was the first flag and only flag used in San Antonio at that eventful time.

Edgar’s company was later sent east, where it served under the command of Confederate General Earl Van Dorn during the Civil War.

In this letter of February 16, 1861, Samuel Maverick authorizes and orders Captain William Edgar to seize an iron safe and its contents.

The flag described by Edgar was donated to the Alamo by his daughter in the early twentieth century and restored in 2006 by Textile Preservation Associations. The field was always thought to have originally been blue; however, conservators determined it had actually been cream colored with a salmon colored star in the center. The Latin motto on the flag translates to Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.

The flag of the Alamo City Guards. Donated by Mrs. O. M. Burt; restoration assisted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Image courtesy of Ernesto Rodriguez, Alamo assistant curator.

The flag is temporarily on display inside the Alamo shrine.

Some information for this entry was provided by Dr. Bruce Winders, Alamo historian and curator.

References and Further Reading

The Exodus of Federal Forces from Texas, 1861 by J. J. Bowden.

Secession and the Union in Texas by Walter L. Buenger.

Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition by Thomas W. Cutrer.

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“To Dissolve the Union Between the State of Texas and the…United States of America”

In February 1861, Texans put themselves on a path of separating from the United States and aligning their state with the Confederacy.

A broadside publicizing the February 1 ordinance declaring that Texas "is a sovereign State and that her citizens and people are absolved from all allegiance to the United States or the Government thereof."

While Texas shared many characteristics of other Southern states, historian Dale Baum writes in The Shattering of Texas Unionism that “the Lone Star State…was also distinctive [as] only Southern state with an international boundary, an extensive western frontier, and a sizable population of Mexicans and Germans” (1).

Additionally, asserts Ralph A. Wooster in the Handbook of Texas Online, “while most Texans had a strong attachment to the Union that they worked so hard to join in 1845, they expressed increasing concern over the attacks upon Southern institutions by Northern political leaders.” Specifically, even though “only one Texas family in four owned slaves, most Texans opposed any interference with the institution of slavery, which they believed necessary for the continued growth of the state.”

"Here I take my stand!" Governor Sam Houston declared soon after Lincoln's election. "So long as the Constitution is maintained by 'Federal authority' and Texas is not made the victim of 'Federal wrong,' I am for the Union as it is."

The Confederate States of America, writes James M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom, “organized itself, drafted a constitution, and set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, within three months of Lincoln’s election.” (By comparison, the second Continental Congress “deliberated fourteen months before declaring American independence in 1776,” and two additional years were needed to write the Constitution and create a new government.) The South “moved so swiftly” because “secession proceeded on a state-by-state basis rather than by collective action” (234). Indeed, following Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, six states in the Deep South left the Union: South Carolina on December 20; Mississippi on January 9, Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 19, and Louisiana on January 26.

In his March 16 broadside "to the people of Texas," governor Houston protested the actions of the secession convention. Its members removed him from office that same day.

These events caused the move towards secession in Texas to gain momentum. When Texas governor Sam Houston refused to call the legislature into special session, secessionist leaders formed a special convention and, on February 1, 1861, approved a secession ordinance by a vote of 166 to 8. Texas voters approved the ordinance by a better than three to one majority (46,153 votes to 14,747 votes) on February 23. The following month, the convention formally joined the Confederate States of America. Texas was the seventh state to secede, and the last to secede before Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4 and the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12-13.

References and Further Reading

The Shattering of Texas Unionism: Politics in the Lone Star State During the Civil War Era by Dale Baum.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson.

Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 1861 edited by Ernest William Winkler; also available online here through the University of Texas at Austin.

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Robert E. Lee in Texas

Many people identify Robert E. Lee – who died on October 12, 1870, in Lexington, Virginia – as the Southern commander of the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War (1861-1865). However, few may know that his career with the United States military lasted for thirty years, beginning with his graduation from West Point in 1831 and ending when he resigned his commission in the Army to join Virginia and the Confederacy in 1861.

A. H. Ritchie's 1861 engraving of Lee. This image is based upon Mathew Brady's photograph of Lee wearing civilian clothes, taken in the early 1850s. The DRT Library's copy is from the National Archives Photographic Records Office. (SC9958)

Lee’s lengthy career took him to posts across the country. On three occasions, his work also took him to Texas. Lee’s first experience in the Lone Star State occurred during the Mexican War, when he arrived in San Antonio in September 1846 and worked to construct and improve roads, bridges, and pontoons used by General John E. Wool’s army as it marched to Saltillo. Lee returned to Texas between March 1856 and October 1857, when he served with the Second Cavalry as it patrolled the state’s border and protected citizens from Indian attacks. After a lengthy return to Virginia, Lee returned to Texas in February 1860 as the acting commander of the Department of Texas, temporarily replacing an ailing General David E. Twiggs. Part of his duty involved pursuing Juan N. Cortina and stopping his border raids.

The approaching Civil War brought Lee’s time in Texas to an end. Less than three weeks after Texas seceded from the Union on February 1, 1861, General Twiggs surrendered all federal property in the state to its Confederate leaders. As a result, Lee and other U.S. soldiers left their posts and headed east.

Lee’s personal and official letters from his time in Texas illustrate his experiences as well as broader circumstances and events in the state at that time. The following document has been reproduced from the records of the federal government, Troubles on Texas Frontier (Thirty-Sixth Congress, First Session, Executive Document No. 81), published by the Government Printing office in 1860. A copy of this document is contained within the collections of the DRT Library.

Headquarters, Department of Texas

San Antonio, March 15, 1860

Colonel: I have had the honor to receive your letters of the 2d and 3d instant, containing the further instructions of the Secretary of War in relation to the outlaw Cortinas.

I take my departure this morning for the Rio Grande.

For the reasons stated in my letter of March 12, the bold and constant depredations on the northern frontier, I have been unwilling to diminish the small force on that line, and consequently the moral effect of the troops on the Rio Grande upon the banditti in Mexico, to oblige them to disperse, will not be as great as I could wish. I enclose an extract from a letter from Major Van Dorn, received yesterday, in further corroboration of the disabled condition of the horses of the second cavalry.

I have given orders that they be spared and nourished as much as possible; and with a view, if possible, of withdrawing the small bands of Indians from the settlements, have directed Major Thomas to organize all the available cavalry force for a general scout, and break up any camps they may have at the head of the Brazos or elsewhere.

For this purpose I have directed him to draw detachments of the first cavalry from the posts of Washita and Arbuckle.

I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

R. E. Lee

Brevet Colonel, Commanding Department of Texas

Colonel S. Cooper,

Adjutant General U.S.A., Washington City, D.C.

P.S. – The speediest way of rendering the second cavalry more effective would be to increase the number of horses to each company, which, by paragraph 4 of General Orders No. 13, Adjutant General’s office, October, 8, 1856, were reduced to sixty. In view of the very hard service they are called upon to make, this would be very desirable, and some of the horses would be recuperating while the others would be in the field. Nor would this add much to the expense of the present arrangement, as it would diminish the number of deaths of horses in the field, their being entirely disabled, and consequent sale.

In this event I would recommend that the requisite number of horses be purchased in this department if practicable, as they would be acclimated, accustomed to grass, &c., and I believe could be procured cheaper than if brought from the Mississippi valley.

R. E. L.

The inscription on the back of this photograph reads, "Genl. R. E. Lee. Photographed at his residence in Richmond, Va., just after the late war between the states." (SC9959)

For Further Reading:

Jenkins, John H., editor. Robert E. Lee on the Rio Grande: The Correspondence of Robert E. Lee on the Texas Border, 1860.

Rister, Carl Coke. Robert E. Lee in Texas.

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