Tamara Diaz/Special to the Advocate
Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads.
In Victoria’s fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War, volunteers from the region trained at Camp Henry E. McCulloch, about 3 miles outside town.
The low-hanging branches of nearby trees obscure the historic marker dedicated to the camp on U.S. 87 just a third-mile shy of Zac Lentz Parkway.
All that is clearly visible is the pole upon which the marker is affixed. It stands next to an empty field — a field likely part of an area where hundreds of troops trained early in 1861.
Regardless of what motivated these men to enlist, they became part of an army raised to defend slavery, according to several historic sources, many available at the Victoria Regional History Center.
“The great majority of immigrants to antebellum Texas came from older Southern states (77% of household heads in Texas in 1860 were Southern born), and many brought their slaves and all aspects of slavery as it had matured in their native states,” Randolph B. Campbell wrote in “An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865.” The book was published in 1989 by the Louisiana State University Press and is available at the regional history center.
During the 1850s, enslaved people accounted for 30% of Texas’ population, Campbell noted.
“Texas must be a slave country,” Stephen F. Austin wrote in the early years of the Republic of Texas. “Circumstances and unavoidable necessity compels it. It is the wish of the people there, and it is my duty to do all I can, prudently, in favor of it. I will do so.”
Without slavery, Austin wrote, Texas could not attract the people to make it a land of sugar and cotton plantations and would instead be populated by shepherds and the poor, Campbell noted in his study.
Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who helped design New York’s Central Park and who was a sometime journalist, was sent by The New York Times in the 1850s to travel through Texas and report on his experience.
His travel journal, “A Journey through Texas,” is on hand at the history center and offers some insight into Victoria at the time of his journey.
Olmstead wrote about several nearby sugar plantations, stretching from Victoria to Seguin, that produced cane of “unusual size, and perfectly developed.”
He wrote about a particular master who had to berate slaves to get work out of them, noting this was in stark contrast to the thrift of German workers recently settled in the Victoria area.
Of course, the German workers were paid for their labors, whereas the enslaved workers were uncompensated.
Of the White people inhabiting Victoria, Olmstead noted a blatant prejudice aimed mostly at Mexican townspeople. White Victorians, he said, spoke of the Mexicans as “vermin, to be exterminated.” He mentioned a lady of Victoria who told him “Mexicans had no business” being in Victoria — a colony founded by a Spanish Mexican family when the area was still part of Mexico.
Olmstead, though he shared some of the prejudicial feelings of his time, noted slavery was the saddest state he ever saw man held to.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the southern states seceded one by one. South Carolina left the Union first and sent commissioners to other southern states in order to convince them to join the exit.
South Carolina Congressman John McQueen was sent as a secessionist envoy to Texas.
Historian Edward H. Bonekemper recently wrote of McQueen’s address to the Texas secession convention in his book “The Myth of the Lost Cause.”
“On February 1, 1861, he told the Texas convention, ‘Lincoln was elected by a sectional vote, whose platform … was to be the abolition of slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves to an equality with ourselves and our children.’”
Bonekemper noted when Texas seceded the day after McQueen gave his speech to the convention, “McQueen praised their rejection of three distinct enemy classes, Indians, Mexicans, and Abolitionists, and predicted ‘that the state would never be reunited with non-slaveholding or fanatical people.’”
In addition, BoneKemper wrote, a Louisiana envoy to Texas, George Williamson, explained the two states’ position in regard to secession.
“Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery … Louisiana and Texas … are both so deeply interested in African slavery that it may be said to be absolutely necessary to their existence.”{/span}
Campbell wrote of a sort of collective amnesia in Texas about slavery and its importance in the formation of the state.
Texas identifies, he wrote, “essentially western rather than southern. The state thus becomes part of the romantic West, the West of cattle ranches, cowboys, and gunfighters and seemingly less compelling moral issues such as the destruction of the Indians. So long as Texas is not seen as a southern state, its people do not have to face the great moral evil of slavery and the bitter heritage of black-white relations that followed the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. Texans are thus permitted to escape part of what C. Vann Woodward called the ‘burden of Southern History.’”
Nevertheless, Texas, as part of the Confederacy, fought to maintain slavery. Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stevens articulated this fact in his famous Cornerstone Speech, saying the new southern government rested on the immutability of slavery.
So, those men gathered on the fields south of today’s Zac Lentz Parkway more than 160 years ago became part of an army set to defend slavery; however, as philosophers Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman recently wrote, “the Confederate soldiers served ‘in simple obedience to duty as they understood it.’ Again — they understood wrongly, but it was their genuine understanding, just as Lincoln was genuine when he ended his famous Cooper Union speech by saying, ‘Let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.’”
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