latoyiapatterson54
Texas was fighting many battles in the 1860's. Texas had seceded from the Union; was being attacked on its western border by Native Americans and was dealing with Union sympathizers among Texans.
Fascinating! I've done a lot of research on north Texas families, mostly those that came here through the Peters Colonies. I haven't seen this book. I'm going to check it out too!
This is a letter written in 1935 by Elina James Wright Wilson in who lived in Comanche County Texas in the 1860's.
Texas was a cotton state and wholly Southern in its attitudes about slavery. Many of the most prominent planters and politicians in the state were openly secessionist. Also working for secession was a shadowy group called the Knights of the Golden Circle. The Knights were for a Southern confederacy that would expand aggressively into Mexico and the Caribbean, creating a vast agricultural empire that would supply world markets with cotton, rice, sugar, and coffee. The Knights actually tried to mount an invasion of Mexico in the spring of 1860, but it collapsed from ineptitude as soon as it began.
HOUSTON, SAMUEL (1793–1863). Sam Houston, one of the most illustrious political figures of Texas, was born on March 2, 1793, the fifth child (and fifth son) of Samuel and Elizabeth (Paxton) Houston, on their plantation in sight of Timber Ridge Church, Rockbridge County, Virginia. He was of Scots-Irish ancestry and reared Presbyterian. He acquired rudimentary education during his boyhood by attending a local school for no more than six months. When he was thirteen years old, his father died; some months later, in the spring of 1807, he emigrated with his mother, five brothers, and three sisters to Blount County in Eastern Tennessee, where the family established a farm near Maryville on a tributary of Baker's Creek. Houston went to a nearby academy for a time and reportedly fed his fertile imagination by reading classical literature, especially the Iliad.
Annotation:
The Secession Convention spelled out the reasons why Texas should leave the Union.
ANTEBELLUM TEXAS. In the drama of Texas history the period of early statehood, from 1846 to 1861, appears largely as an interlude between two great adventures-the Republic of Texas and the Civil War. These fifteen years did indeed lack the excitement and romance of the experiment in nationhood and the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy. Events and developments during the period, however, were critical in shaping the Lone Star State as part of the antebellum South. By 1861 Texas was so like the other Southern states economically, socially, and politically that it joined them in secession and war. Antebellum Texans cast their lot with the Old South and in the process gave their state an indelibly Southern heritage.
