 Every November, a liendo plantation just outside of Hempstead. Hundreds gathered to watch re-enactments of the Civil War battles. While today we commemorate this period in American history with festivities, barbecues, and fun events, the war cost many lives and caused considerable damage. Following the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, several southern states left the Union. When the Texas Governor refused to authorize the Texas Secession Convention, one was held anyway with the support of the legislature, and the governor was ousted. Texas voters approved Secession 3-1. And although the major battles happened outside of Texas, almost 90,000 Texans served in the Civil War. But not all of them served the Confederacy. More than 2,000 served in the Union. Many who opposed Secession left the state, and many German and Mexican Texans were divided and even attacked. The Civil War in Texas was truly a war between Texans. One of the things we have to remember about the Civil War is very little actual battles took place in Texas. Most of the fighting, most of the battles in the Civil War, happened in the eastern seaboard and along the Mississippi River Valley. But Texas was involved. Many Texans did fight and signed up and did send troops over to the west. But Texas was involved in other ways. One of the things that Texas had to do was guard the frontier. And that meant the frontier not only because of Native American incursions, but also along the southern border, along the Rio Grande. They also had to guard the coastal region around Galveston, the Sabine River, Corpus Christi in those areas. So there was fighting that did go on, but it wasn't as heated or as devastating to the rest of the state as you saw in some of the other states involved in the Civil War. One thing we have to acknowledge is the role of slavery. Not only can you look at the Texas Declaration of Causes, which is in your primary sources, to see how slavery was important to the secession movement, but you also have to understand that people from the south were coming in. Delegates from southern states who had seceded were coming into Texas, trying to urge Texas lawmakers to follow suit and do the same thing and leave the Union. So slavery was very important, and if we look at how slavery expanded from the time Texas fought for their independence in 1836 to 1860 at the start of the Civil War, that slavery increased along with Anglos immigration, usually from southern states bringing slaves with them. Now there was still a problem because the Rio Grande during the Civil War was unguarded, or at least not guarded as well as it had been before, and a lot of slaves did escape through the Rio Grande into Mexico. But you have to realize that it was a long way, and settlement was very far from those Brazos rivers, even in south Texas around Corpus Christi, to the border. So there were slaves who did escape, there weren't many of them, but it was a fluid and a porous border. As far as slavery in Texas, it follows very closely to what we see in the South as a whole. Of southern slaveholders, only about 25% of head of households, those are male, white male head of households in the South, owned slaves. In Texas it was a little bit higher, 27% of families owned slaves. But like the rest of the South, the number of people who owned more than 5 or 10 slaves was relatively few. So if we look at Texas, only about half of the people who owned slaves, and that's less than 30% of the families, owned fewer than 5 slaves. So most had 1, 2, 3 slaves that worked with them and worked side by side with them. So the plantations were much, much smaller. If you had 20 or more slaves, you could call yourself a plantation owner. And only 10% of Texas slave owners were planters. And if we look at those who owned more than 100 slaves, 54 families or 2.5% of the slave holding families owned slaves. So slavery was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. But those wealthy slave owners produced 90% of the cotton. So that meant if you were a non-slaveholder and you were hoping to make a lot of money in cotton, you probably weren't going to do that well. Planters owned half of the slaves. So even the small slaveholders didn't own the majority of the slaves. So you can see there was also an economic struggle within the slaveholders and those who didn't own slaves. Some of the factors that led to this session, if you're familiar with the Civil War at all, one of the things that we saw was the increase in sectionalism. North versus South, East versus West. And much of that turned on the issue of slavery. In 1857, for example, the Supreme Court ruled on the Dred Scott case. And in Dred Scott, this was out of Missouri, a slave who was owned by an army doctor sued for his freedom saying that he had been taken above 36-30 line, the Missouri Compromise Line, and the United States Congress had ruled that there would be no slavery above that line. Well, he said I was taken above there, so therefore there was no slavery, so I should be free. The Supreme Court said, first of all, a slave could not file suit because slaves were considered property and not citizens. Another thing they said was that African-Americans had played no role in the founding of the United States. That simply wasn't true, but it factored into the Supreme Court's decision. They also said that just because he was taken into free territory did not mean he was a slave. They looked at the Constitution and they said, you know, property is property. And if you take property into another state, does it stop being your property? They said no. So Dred Scott lost the decision, and this was very upsetting for abolitionists and Northerners in general. Very soon thereafter, there was a battle in Kansas and Nebraska over whether or not that territory would be slave or free. And an abolitionist from Connecticut, a man named John Brown and his sons, led a raid on a slave-holding settlement in the Nebraska territory and murdered several people. This is John Brown's raid. It was reviled across the South as an example of what abolitionists and non-slave holders would do to Southerners. Many people in the North didn't like it either, but they said John Brown's heart may have been in the right place, but his attitude was wrong, and certainly what he did was wrong. And by the time of Lincoln's election the next year, tensions were very high. And Lincoln, although he said many times in the campaign that he would not touch slavery, that he would have nothing to do with slavery, when he was elected, and that the state of North Carolina seceded and other states followed thereafter. In Texas, around the same time, there were other incidents that exacerbated the tensions between slave-holding and non-slave-holding people, people from North who had come to Texas and people from the South who had come to Texas. First, there were a series of fires in the summer of 1860 in North Texas around the Dallas area. These fires were blamed upon abolitionists and Northerners. What later study has shown is that there were in many stores, many of these small, rural stores in these settlements, there was a new type of match, a quick-light match being sold. And the chemicals, composition that made up the match-head, was actually very sensitive to heat, and when it got hot, they would ignite on their own. And so there's a theory that this is what caused the fires, rather than the abolitionists, but because suspicion was so high, because tensions were so tight, it was very easy to see this as part of a wider conspiracy. In response to these tensions and these fears of conspiracy, vigilante committees were organized, and several people were hanged. In fact, one of the biggest mass hangings that took place was in Gainesville, northwest of Fort Worth, where about 40 suspected unionists or union sympathizers were hanged in October of 1862, and a couple of others were shot trying to escape. So this paranoia continues for several years that there were infiltrators, there were union sympathizers or abolitionists that were trying to undermine the Confederate cause. Sam Houston also was caught up in this fear, and he was a victim of it as well. He was a unionist. Now he was opposed to popular sovereignty. He was a member of a no-nothing party. The no-nothing party, or the American party, was a political party that came about in the 1840s and the early 1850s. It was called the American party because it was kind of anti-immigrant in some places, but it was very pro-the union staying together, and Sam Houston was part of that. In 1859, he was elected governor, and he was opposed to secession. When pro-secession Southerners came into Texas and tried to convince people to secede, Houston avoided calling a convention. He refused to call a secession convention. They convened on their own in early January of 1861 and voted, and the Texas voters also ratified this, secession on February 23rd. They came into Houston and kicked him out of office. They removed him from office on March 16th. So he was forced out of office in order for the state to secede. In 1861, the U.S. troops pulled out of Texas, and that meant that they pulled out of western frontier forts where they were guarding against Native Americans. They pulled out of Brownsville in the border where they were protecting trade between the United States and Mexico, and the Texans now had to muster forces to fill these posts, and they had to train them, they had to prepare for attacks from Federals, and they also had to prepare for attacks from Native Americans or anywhere else. There were also some Union forces that had been hiding out in Mexico that would later on attack. So Texans not only had to guard their own frontier now and their border, they also wanted to supply other states that were fighting much more heavy battles than they were. So there was a Union blockade of Galveston. This was part of the North's Anaconda plan to squeeze off trade with the South from European countries, and Galveston was blockaded in other places too. Texans also fought at Glory Head of Pass in New Mexico, and although they won the war, they won the battle over there, it was still a very costly battle to prevent against Union forces coming in from New Mexico and California. The Union was also interested in controlling Texas' ports, and there were several attempts at Galveston and Corpus Christi for Union forces to take over, but Texan forces were able to hold them at bay. The Union destroyed Fort Sabine on the Sabine River. In September, they captured Galveston, but the Confederates were able to recapture Galveston early in 1863. And so Confederates had to reinforce their own Gulf Coast as well. The Battle Sabine Pass of September of 1863, this is a picture of Dick Dowling, the hero of Sabine Pass. On July 4th of 1863, Gettysburg and Vicksburg both fell to Union forces, and there were plans to attack weak points in other Confederate spots along the coast. And so the Union attacked Fort Griffith on the Sabine, and Dick Dowling was able to keep them for over an hour off. They gathered a whole lot of Union casualties and captured two Union ships. So Dowling is considered a Texas Confederate hero. In South Texas, at this time the French had taken control of Mexico, and Mexico was engaged in its own battle to regain control from the French forces. In November of 1863, Confederates abandoned Brownsville because Union troops had landed there on the coast. And Union forces began moving up the Rio Grande to take control of the border. And finally the Union later on abandoned Fort Brownsville in July of 1864. So there was a lot of going back and forth between Union and Confederate forces along the Rio Grande and along the Gulf Coast region. Finally by 1865 the Confederacy had wasted its energy and it was spent. Lee surrendered on April the 9th. On June the 2nd, General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered Galveston. The final battle of the Civil War actually took place after the Civil War was over. It's called the Battle of Palmetto Ranch and it happened in Brownsville. The Union forces were coming in to resupply and to retake over the fort. The Confederates in Brownsville had not learned that they had surrendered. And so they surrounded and took the Union forces captive. And it was only when they found out a few minutes later that they had indeed already surrendered that they surrendered to the Union forces at Brownsville. And I don't think there was any bloodshed or it was very minimal, maybe a few shots were fired. But it is the last battle of the Civil War. Once all the battles were over and all the surrenders had taken place, the Civil War came to an end and it fell upon Texas to begin rebuilding itself along with all the other nations that had seceded from the Union. How would they get back in? What would they do about the African Americans that were now free? Were they going to be free at all? Or would slavery come back? These were all questions that people had and it's left up to the reconstruction process to answer them.