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During six months in 1862, William Jefferson Whatley and his wife, Nancy Falkaday Watkins Whatley, exchanged a series of letters that vividly demonstrate the quickly changing roles of women whose husbands left home to fight in the Civil War. When William Whatley enlisted with the Confederate Army in 1862, he left his young wife Nancy in charge of their cotton farm in East Texas, near the village of Caledonia in Rusk County. In letters to her husband, Nancy describes in elaborate detail how she dealt with and felt about her new role, which thrust her into an array of unfamiliar duties, including dealing with increasingly unruly slaves, overseeing the harvest of the cotton crop, and negotiating business transactions with unscrupulous neighbors. At the same time, she carried on her traditional family duties and tended to their four young children during frequent epidemics of measles and diphtheria. Stationed hundreds of miles away, her husband could only offer her advice, sympathy, and shared frustration. In An East Texas Family’s Civil War, the Whatleys’ great-grandson, John T. Whatley, transcribes and annotates these letters for the first time. Notable for their descriptions of the unraveling of the local slave labor system and accounts of rural southern life, Nancy’s letters offer a rare window on the hardships faced by women on the home front taking on unprecedented responsibilities and filling unfamiliar roles.
In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources—including thousands of letters and unpublished journals—he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants’ own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state was increasingly populated by immigrants from all parts of the South and foreign countries. When the war began, it was not just Texas that many of these soldiers enlisted to protect, but also their native states, where they had family ties.
On February 1, 1861, delegates at the Texas Secession Convention elected to leave the Union. The people of Texas supported the actions of the convention in a statewide referendum, paving the way for the state to secede and to officially become the seventh state in the Confederacy. Soon the Texans found themselves engaged in a bloody and prolonged civil war against their northern brethren. During the curse of this war, the lives of thousands of Texans, both young and old, were changed forever. This new anthology, edited by Kenneth W. Howell, incorporates the latest scholarly research on how Texans experienced the war. Eighteen contributors take us from the battlefront to the home front, ranging from inside the walls of a Confederate prison to inside the homes of women and children left to fend for themselves while their husbands and fathers were away on distant battlefields, and from the halls of the governor’s mansion to the halls of the county commissioner’s court in Colorado County. Also explored are well-known battles that took place in or near Texas, such as the Battle of Galveston, the Battle of Nueces, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the Red River Campaign. Finally, the social and cultural aspects of the war receive new analysis, including the experiences of women, African Americans, Union prisoners of war, and noncombatants.
This book is not too different from other county history books of this era. With such topics as County creation, Courthouses, Newspapers, schools, Churches, Spanish Mission & Edens-Madden Massacre - all important in the development of the county - are carefully discussed. This type of county history book can help one develop ideas or paths to those missing ancestors by showing the customs and traditions of the local residents. A particular useful feature of this book is the extensive biographical information included. Almost half of this book is devoted to 73 biographical sketches. Surnames of biographical sketches are: Adair, Adams, Aldrich (6), Allbright, Baker, Barbee, Bayne, Beasley, Beeson (2), Berry, Box, Bracken, Bromberg, Burnett, Coleman, Collins (6), Cooper, Corley, Daniel, Davis (2), Dickerson, English (2), Gossett, Gause, Gillespie, Hall (3), Hallmark, Heflin, Hunter, Ingram, Johnson, Jowers, King (2), Kyle, LeGory, Long, Lundy, Madden, Mainer, Masters, McConnell, McLean, Meiwether, Miller, Monroe, Moore, Murchison (2), Nunn (2), Page, Patton, Pence, Randolph, Read, Rice, Smith, Stidham, Stokes, taylor, Thomas, Thompson, Tunstall, Wall, Williams, Woldert, Wortham, Worthington & Zavala.
So wrote Texas pioneer cattle drover William Berry Duncan in his March 1862 diary entry, the day he joined the Confederate Army. Despite his misgivings, Duncan left his prosperous business to lead neighbors and fellow volunteers as commanding officer of cavalry Company F of Spaight’s Eleventh Battalion that later became the 21st Texas Infantry in America’s Civil War. Philip Caudill’s rich account, drawn from Duncan’s previously untapped diaries and letters written by candlelight on the Gulf Coast cattle trail to New Orleans, in Confederate Army camps, and on his southeast Texas farm after the war, reveals the personable Duncan as a man of steadfast integrity and extraordinary leadership. After the war, he returned to his home in Liberty County and battled for survival on the chaotic Reconstruction-era Texas frontier. Supplemented by archival records and complementary accounts, Moss Bluff Rebel paints a picture of everyday life for the Anglo-Texans who settled the Mexican land grants in the early nineteenth century and subsequently became citizens of the proudly independent Texas Republic. The carefully crafted narrative goes on to reveal the wartime emotions of a reluctant Confederate officer and his postwar struggles to reinvent the lifestyle he knew before the war, a way of life he sensed was lost forever. Moss Bluff Rebel will appeal to history lovers of all ages attracted to the drama of the Civil War period and the men and women who shaped the Texas frontier.
Family history and genealogical information about the descendants of William Daugherty Harrison and Jane Patton. William was born ca. 1814 in Bedford Co., Tennessee. He was the son of John Harrison and Elizabeth Daugherty. Jane was born ca. 1823 in South Carolina. She was the daughter of James Patton. William Harrison married Jane Patton 12 September 1839 in Texas. They lived in Houston Co., Texas and were the parents of two sons and seven daughters. Descendants lived primarily in Texas.
Two family names have come to be associated with the violence that plagued Colorado County, Texas, for decades after the end of the Civil War: the Townsends and the Staffords. Both prominent families amassed wealth and achieved status, but it was their resolve to hold on to both, by whatever means necessary, including extra-legal means, that sparked the feud. Elected office was one of the paths to success, but more important was control of the sheriff’s office, which gave one a decided advantage should the threat of gun violence arise. No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell concentrates on those individual acts of private justice associated with the Stafford and Townsend families. It began with an 1871 shootout in Columbus, followed by the deaths of the Stafford brothers in 1890. The second phase blossomed after 1898 with the assassination of Larkin Hope, and concluded in 1911 with the violent deaths of Marion Hope, Jim Townsend, and Will Clements, all in the space of one month.
Much of the Civil War west of the Mississippi was a war of waiting for action, of foraging already stripped land for an army that supposedly could provision itself, and of disease in camp, while trying to hold out against Union pressure. There were none of the major engagements that characterized the conflict farther east. Instead, small units of Confederate cavalry and infantry skirmished with Federal forces in Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana, trying to hold the western Confederacy together. The many units of Texans who joined this fight had a second objective—to keep the enemy out of their home state by placing themselves “between the enemy and Texas.” Historian Anne J. Bailey studies one Texas unit, Parsons's Cavalry Brigade, to show how the war west of the Mississippi was fought. Historian Norman D. Brown calls this “the definitive study of Parsons's Cavalry Brigade; the story will not need to be told again.” Exhaustively researched and written with literary grace, Between the Enemy and Texas is a “must” book for anyone interested in the role of mounted troops in the Trans-Mississippi Department.
Of the many infantry brigades in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, John Bell Hood's Texas Brigade earned the reputation as perhaps the premier unit. From 1862 until Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the brigade fought in most of the major campaigns in the Eastern Theater and several more in the Western, including the Seven Days, Second Manassas (Second Bull Run), Sharpsburg (Antietam), Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Knoxville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, the siege of Richmond and Petersburg, and Appomattox. Distinguished for its fierce tenacity and fighting ability, the brigade suffered some of the war's highest casualties. This volume chronicles Hood's Texas Brigade from its formation through postwar commemorations, providing a soldier's-eye view of the daring and bravery of this remarkable unit.