Texas by James A. Michener
‘Any trouble along the Red River?’
‘A great deal, if the truth were known. We suspect rebellion in that quarter. Watch it closely.’ Flicking dust from his handsome General Quimper boots, he asked solicitously: ‘How are the women? Is Petty Prue able …?’ His voice drifted, indicating the concern he felt about leaving a woman in charge of a major plantation.
‘We give her what help we can.’
‘We?’
‘Yes, Trajan and I. He really runs things, you know.’
‘The mills, yes. But surely he doesn’t …’
‘Reuben, we have to use every hand we have. You know, I’m going off, first chance I get.’
‘You’re needed here, Sett.’
‘I cannot have my son in uniform, my two nephews … What do you hear from the boys?’
‘John tells me that the Texas Brigade has seen more battle than any unit in the army. Wherever they go, major combat. If it’s critical, Lee calls for Hood.’
‘He hasn’t been wounded … or anything?’
‘God looks after brave men. I believe that, Sett. If two men march into battle, it’s the coward who dies first.’ He reflected on this, then asked: ‘And how’s Millicent?’
‘Poorly. But she was never strong, you know. The absence of the boys, mine and yours …’
‘You mustn’t let her grieve. I ordered Petty Prue not to grieve just because she has two sons in service. Fact is, Sett, we should all be celebrating. Lee and men like Jeb Stuart, they’re pushing the Yanks about.’
Very carefully Sett asked: ‘Do your men, the sensible ones, that is, do they still think we can win this war?’
Reuben leaped to his feet. ‘What an awful question! In my own house!’ When his temper cooled he said: ‘We’ve got to win. The entire fate of the South …’
‘But can we win?’ Sett hammered, and Reuben avoided an answer: ‘I’m puttin’ in for duty in the east … with Lee.’ He submitted his papers and was accepted.
When the Texas plebiscite on secession was broken down by counties, it was found that eighteen out of a total of 152, of which 122 were organized, had signified their desire to remain in the Union: seven along the northern border, where Southern traditions had not been able to prevail because of the constant influx of settlers from the North, ten among the German counties in the center of the state, where abolitionism had gained root, and one, Angelina, which stood alone and unexplained; its vote defied logical explanation. Equally dangerous, eleven other counties had come within ten percent of voting for the Union. Texas had not been nearly as unanimous in its support of the South as the Cobbs had predicted.
In the hill country, fiery abolitionists were visiting German settlements and trying to inflame the residents with talk about opposing slavery. When they reached Fredericksburg they awakened response in certain families who felt that slavery was an intolerable wrong, but they accomplished little with the Allerkamps or with their daughter, Franziska, whose husband was down along the Nueces pursuing Benito Garza. However, they did enlist the vigorous support of three families, who put them in touch with like-minded Germans to the south.
After a careful evaluation of that area, the abolitionists returned to the Allerkamp settlement with a persuasive proposal: ‘We all know that slavery is wrong. We know it debases the man who practices it and the man who suffers it. What we propose is nothing radical. It injures no one. It can raise no opposition among those who support the Confederacy.’
‘And what is that?’ Ludwig asked, because he had for some time now been seeking just such a solution to his confusion.
‘We shall leave Texas for the moment. We shall quit all the wrongdoing, all the killing. And we shall go quietly down into Mexico, hurting no one and seeking refuge there until this senseless war is over.’
On 1 August 1862, sixty-five Germans, including Ludwig Allerkamp and his son Emil, headed west, then south, to escape the war.
General Yancey Quimper, feeling himself responsible for the safety of the Confederacy whether the threat came from the Red River or from Fredericksburg, had infiltrated into the latter area a spy named Henry Steward, who reported to Quimper:
Fifteen hundred fully armed and rebellious Germans have been meeting secretly at a place in the hills near Fredericksburg, where not a word of English is spoken, at a secluded spot called Lion Creek. I know that these men are plotting to terrorize towns like Austin and San Antonio, then cross the Rio Grande into Mexico, from where they will sail to New Orleans in hopes of joining the Northern army.
When Quimper, keeping an eye on Northern sympathizers along the Red River, read this report and visualized a contingent of fifteen hundred effectives joining the Federals, he became determined to thwart them and wanted to leave immediately to engage them in battle before they could reach the Rio Grande. But when he presented the details to Major Reuben Cobb, the latter said: ‘This is the word of one spy, and not a reliable one, if what I hear of him is true,’ so the dash south was postponed. In further discussion Cobb pointed out several weaknesses in the story: ‘How do we know they intend enlisting in the Northern army? What proof have we that they’re doing anything but escaping into Mexico?’ Three days later the spy Steward was found with his throat cut.
Infuriated by this attack, Cobb became even more eager than Quimper to punish the Germans, and together they rushed south to place themselves under the command of a mercurial Captain Duff, who had been dishonorably discharged in peacetime but allowed back in war. Duff’s ninety-four mounted men sighted the sixty-five Germans fleeing on foot at the banks of the Nueces, a river accustomed to violent deeds, and less than fifty miles from Mexico. ‘We must not let them escape,’ Quimper whispered to Duff, who replied: ‘They ain’t goin’ to.’
On the night of 9 August 1862, with safety in Mexico near at hand, Ludwig Allerkamp was most uneasy when the men commanding the German escape decided to spend a relaxed evening under the stars rather than forge ahead to the Rio Grande. ‘We should get out of Texas immediately,’ Ludwig argued, but the commander lulled him with assurances that no Confederate troops would bother them, or even care that they were heading for Mexico.
It was a lovely summer’s night graced with fresh-shot turkey, the inevitable choral singing and even several bottles of San Antonio beer used to toast homes in Texas: ‘Till we come back in peace.’ And of course, when the eating ended there were the inevitable formal discussions which Germans seemed to need; a man from Fredericksburg served as chairman for ‘Crushed Hopes in Germany,’ and a doctor for ‘Health Problems We Will Encounter in Mexico,’ but at the conclusion of the meeting Ludwig suggested: ‘I think we should post sentries tonight,’ and when asked why, he responded: ‘We are of military age and we are leaving the country. We could be arrested as deserters.’ The others laughed at his fears.
General Quimper said as the sun set: ‘We were damned lucky to have overtaken them,’ but he was grievously disappointed to find that instead of the fifteen hundred Germans his spy had reported, there were fewer than seventy. ‘Not many Germans,’ Quimper told Duff, ‘but they form a dangerous body,’ and every precaution was taken to see that none escaped.
The Confederate troops were astonished at how close to the Germans they were able to move without detection, and the contingents that waded across the Nueces to cut off any rush to the south splashed water when two men fell in, but even this did not alert the sleepers.
At three in the morning Ludwig Allerkamp awakened and grew uneasy when Emil did not answer his call. He started to look for him, but before he could find the young man he stumbled into a nest of soldiers, who fired at him indiscriminately; they missed him but killed his son, who had leaped to his feet when the firing started.
Now the shooting became general, and terribly confused, with the Confederate soldiers firing their deadly Sharps directly into the terrified mass of Germans, who tried to establish a defensive line from which to return fire. Some fell, shot dead; some splashed back across the Nueces
Three soldiers in gray charged at Allerkamp, stabbing at him with their bayonets and shouting their battle cry ‘For Southern Freedom.’ When the bloody skirmish ended shortly after dawn, there were nineteen Germans and two Confederates killed in one of the least justified actions of the war.
There were also nine wounded Germans who, seeing no possibility of escape, surrendered. And it was what happened to them that caused the battle at the Nueces to be so bitterly remembered, for while they lay helpless in the morning sunlight, Captain Duff asked Quimper to help him drag them off to one side. When Major Cobb heard about this he cried automatically: ‘Oh Jesus!’ but he was too late to interfere, for as he ran to halt whatever evil thing was afoot, he heard shots, and when Duff and Quimper returned they were smiling.
‘What in hell have you done?’ Cobb shouted, and Duff said: ‘We don’t take prisoners.’
When Cobb checked the battlefield, he found that twenty-eight Germans had been slain and thirty-seven had escaped. Eight would be killed later trying to cross the Rio Grande, nine others were killed elsewhere, one crept back to Fredericksburg, and the rest escaped either into Mexico or California, where, as Quimper had feared, some of them joined the Union army.
On the way back to the Red River, Major Cobb pondered this extraordinary act, and as a partisan of the South he felt obligated to find an excuse, if there was one: If the Germans had escaped into Mexico, certainly they’d have run to New Orleans or Baltimore to fight against us.… We’ve instituted a legal draft, and they refused to comply.… This is war, and they killed some of our good men. But no matter how he rationalized Quimper’s actions, he could construct no justification. Damn it all, no gentleman that I know would shoot nine helpless prisoners.
As a result of this self-examination, Cobb made two major decisions. The first was inevitable: I shall no longer place my honor in the hands of Yancey Quimper. He disgusts me. The second, representing his growing maturity, was reported in a letter to his wife:
I’ve been thinking about honor and battle a good deal recently, and especially those fine talks we had with the Peel people in Vicksburg. I’m fed up with second best. I love the people in Walter Scott’s novels and want to conduct myself like them. I made a terrible mistake when I named our plantation Lakeview. Means nothing. From here on, with your permission, it’s to be Lammermoor. That sings to the heart.
On the night before they reached the Red River, with Major Cobb encamped as far from General Quimper as he decently could, another soldier embittered by events at the Nueces told him: ‘You know, Major, I’ve heard that Quimper was never a real general, and his behavior at San Jacinto … he talks so much about it, maybe it wasn’t the way he says.’ If such rumors were true, Cobb thought, they would explain a lot.
Cobb refused to ride with Quimper when they headed north to duty along the Red River, and he suspected that when they met, there would be a certain tenseness. But the big, flabby fellow was as sickeningly jovial as ever: ‘Great to have you back, Reuben. Important work up here.’
Trying to mask his dislike, Cobb temporized: ‘Yancey, the way you handled those German prisoners …’ Quimper leaned in to forestall criticism: ‘We did all right. But now we’re onto something much bigger.’
And on the very next day Cobb was with Quimper when two spies came before them to report:
‘Evil elements have slipped down from Arkansas. They’ve accumulated massive arms and have conspired with Texas citizens to stage a vast uprising. Our slaves are to cooperate when the signal is given and kill all white men in the district, women and children too.’
Cobb, remembering that Quimper’s other spy had detected fifteen hundred Germans in motion when there were actually fewer than seventy, was reluctant to accept this new call to frenzy, but when he quietly initiated his own inquiries, he learned to his dismay that there was a plan for insurrection and that nearly a hundred participants were incriminated. So once more he was thrown in with Quimper, whether he wished it or not, and now began one of the startling events of the war, as far as Texas was involved.
The frightened defenders of the Confederacy placed their security in the hands of General Quimper, who, with considerable skill, arranged for a coordinated swoop upon the plotters. This move bagged some seventy conspirators, and there was serious talk of hanging them all. General Quimper loudly supported this decision, but Major Cobb rallied the more sober citizens, who devised a more reasonable procedure. A self-appointed citizens committee, hoping to avoid any criticism of Southern justice through the accidental hanging of the innocent, met and nominated twelve of the best-respected voters of the area, including two doctors and two clergymen, to serve as a court of law—judge, jury, hangman—and these twelve, following rules of evidence and fair play, would try the accused.
It was this laborious process which Quimper wanted to by-pass with his waiting nooses, but men like Cobb insisted upon it, so on the first day of October 1862 the drumhead court convened. Its first batch of prisoners was quickly handled:
‘Dr. Henry Childs, in accordance with the decision of this Court you will be taken from your place of confinement, on the fourth day of October ’62 between the hours of twelve and two o’clock of said day, and hung by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.’
The executions were held in midafternoon so that townspeople could gather about the hanging tree, a stately elm at the edge of town from whose branches three or sometimes four corpses would dangle. No observers seemed dissatisfied with the hangings, for the victims had been legally judged and the verdicts delivered without rancor. There was, moreover, considerable interest shown in the manner with which each of the condemned met his death, and those who did so in ways deemed proper were afterward applauded.
On and on the fearful litany continued: Ephraim Childs, brother of the above, hanged; A. D. Scott, hanged: ‘He viewed calmly the preparations for his execution. And when the last awful moment arrived he jumped heavily from the carriage; and falling near three feet, dislocated his neck, he died without the violent contraction of a single muscle’; M. D. Harper, hanged; I. W. P. Lock, hanged: ‘His conduct throughout revealed all the elements of a depraved nature, and he died upon the tree exhibiting that defiance of death that usually seizes hold on the last moments of a depraved, wicked and abandoned heart.’ His crime, and that of the others: he had preferred the Union to the South.
After twenty festive hangings had occurred, Major Cobb was sickened by the illegality of such actions, for he had reason to believe that several men clearly innocent had been hanged. He spoke with certain humane men on the jury, advising against any further executions, and his arguments were so persuasive—‘Excess merely brings discredit to our cause’—that the hangings were stopped, and nineteen additional men who would otherwise surely have been executed were to be set free, an act which most citizens approved, for they had wearied of the ringing of the bell that announced the next assembly at the hanging tree. Quimper, however, railed against what he called ‘this miscarriage of justice.’
‘Hang them all!’ he bellowed so repeatedly that the rougher element in town began to take up the cry, and he would have succeeded in organizing a mob to break down the jail had not Cobb and others prevailed upon the men not to stain their just cause by such a reprehensible act. That night, however, someone in the bushes near town—who, was never known—shot two well-regarded citizens, partisans of the Confederacy, and now no arguments could save the men still in jail. Quimper wanted to hang them immediately. Cobb insisted that they be given a legal trial, and they were, fifteen minutes of rushed testimony and
‘C. A. Jones known as Humpback, James Powers known as Carpenter, Thomas Baker known as Old Man, and nine others tried on the same bill, all found guilty and sentenced to be hung, the evidence having revealed a plot which for its magnitude, infamy, treachery and barbarity is without a parallel in the annals of crime.’
So thirty-nine men guilty only of siding with an unacceptable moral position were hanged; three who had nebulous connections with the Confederate military were tried by court-martial and hanged; two others were shot trying to escape. But this was not a lynching or a case of mob frenzy; it was an instance of the heat of warfare in which men dedicated to one cause could not see any justification in the other. Even in its fury the jury endeavored to maintain some semblance of order, and of the accused men brought before it, twenty-four were found not guilty and set free.
Cobb, a tempestuous man who had always fought his battles openly, was now thoroughly revolted by the hangings, and in a letter to his wife, posted on the last day of the executions, he wrote:
There was a man in jail who was charged with being a deserter from the Southern army, and a horse thief. When the jury on this day failed to furnish any Northerners to hang, the bloodthirsty men outside took that man from the jail and hanged him.
Two days later Cobb left his post at the Red River without permission, rode south to his plantation, and announced that he was organizing a unit for service with General Lee. Among his first volunteers was his cousin Somerset, who apologized to his ailing wife: ‘Lissa, it tears my heart to see you in worsening health, and I know it’s my duty to stay with you, but I simply cannot abide in idleness when others die for our cause.’ The brothers’ first flush of patriotism waned when they learned that they would be serving not in the cavalry with Lee, but in an infantry unit, for as Reuben exploded: ‘Any Texan with a shred of dignity would ride to war, not march.’ But march they did, to Vicksburg.