Texas Ordinance of Secession, 1861
Today in class I briefly read from the Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union, adopted by the Texas secession convention in Austin on February 2, 1861. I would encourage you to read the entire declaration online, noting how often the document returns to slavery and race as causes for secession.
It is also worth noting that there was a groundswell of support for secession in Texas at around the time this declaration was issued. As a recent post on the New York Times “Disunion” blog notes, Unionists in Texas were an embattled group that did not put up much of a fight to keep Texas in the Union. On February 16, 1861, U.S. General David Twiggs and all the federal troops under his command quickly surrendered under pressure from hundreds of armed secessionists who surrounded him in San Antonio. Two days later, without a shot being fired, he and his troops filed out of Texas, leaving it to the Confederacy.
If you had happened to be in earlier this year, you might have seen a reenactment of Twiggs’ surrender. As a recent article in the Texas Observer reported, this reenactment–organized partly by the Sons of Confederate Veterans–takes place every year on the plaza of the Alamo. But as the article also notes, if you had asked the reenactment’s organizers about the reasons for Texas’s secession, you probably wouldn’t have heard much about slavery. One of the past organizers interviewed by the Observer even said bluntly that “the South was fighting for states’ rights,” not about slavery per se.
That reenactment is another reminder of a point made today in class: that the American Civil War “era” is still “ongoing” to a certain extent, and that people continue to look to and remember the war for wildly divergent reasons. Throughout this semester we will be shuttling back and forth between the nineteenth century and the present, paying due attention to the differences and connections between what the war meant to people like Robert L. Thompson and people living today.