Local History
Texas Civil War Unionist Historical Markers: The Texans Who Said No to Secession
Eighteen Texas counties voted against secession in 1861. These eight historical markers, from Comfort to Gainesville to the Capitol grounds in Austin, record what it cost the Texans who stayed loyal to the Union.
Photo: Bryan Dickerson / Unsplash. Texas Hill Country.
Texas carries more than 16,000 official historical markers. A handful record something the state spent a century avoiding. Texans who refused to leave the Union. RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform that surfaces those markers as you drive past them. This article covers eight of them, in Comfort, Ingram, New Braunfels, Gainesville, and Austin. Stopping at any one of them is participation in preservation, because a marker nobody visits is a marker nobody funds.
Start with the vote. On February 23, 1861, Texas decided secession at the ballot box. The result was 46,153 for and 14,747 against. Eighteen of 122 counties voted no, and most of them clustered in the German Hill Country and the northern counties along the Red River. The markers below sit in that geography.
Comfort's Monument Is Written in German
"Treue Der Union" stands in Comfort, in Kendall County. The name means "Loyalty to the Union." German settlers put it up in 1866, one year after the war ended. It honors 68 men from the region who stayed loyal to the United States.
About 40 of them died trying to leave. They rode for Mexico, hoping to reach federal troops, and a Confederate force caught them at the Nueces River on August 10, 1862. A second fight followed on October 18. Confederates left the dead where they fell. Others drowned crossing the Rio Grande, and nobody buried them either. In 1865, a group of Germans went back for the bones of their friends and buried them at this site. The state added its own marker in 1968.
The monument has no street address. Navigate to the Treue der Union monument in Comfort, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Forty miles west, near Ingram in Kerr County, a marker at Henderson Cemetery names a man who lived through that ambush. Howard Henderson came to Texas in 1857 and survived the Battle of the Nueces in 1862. He later served as a Texas Ranger. He married Narcissa Turknett in 1866 and settled near this site. Their infant twin sons, Thomas and Philip, died in 1870, and the family burial ground started with those two graves.
Use the Henderson Cemetery marker near Ingram, TX to get there.
The Free Thinkers Who Voted Against Secession
The Hill Country Germans didn't arrive as accidental Unionists. A marker at 403 Highway 27 in Comfort explains why. Freidenker tells the story of the German Freethinkers who immigrated between 1845 and 1861. Many were veterans of the failed 1848 revolution back home.
They founded Bettina, Castell, Cypress Mill, Luckenbach, Sisterdale, Tusculum near Boerne, and Comfort itself. Settlers laid out Comfort in 1854, and it quickly held about half the Freethinker population of the Hill Country. Their settlements got called "Latin Colonies," because reading Latin was treated as the baseline for a cultured life. They backed secular schools, universal equal rights, and the abolition of slavery. They rejected secession outright. The marker states the cost plainly. Their loyalty to the Union during the war cost many of them their freedom and their lives.
Visit 403 Highway 27, Comfort, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
In New Braunfels, the Texas Germans in the Civil War marker is more honest than most Civil War markers you'll read. It says ten heavily German counties voted against secession in 1861, and that Comal County was the exception. It says states' rights confused voters who had just taken naturalization oaths. It says some men avoided service to protect their families and others left to join U.S. units. Then it says majority sentiment in the county supported the Confederacy, and that three companies from Comal served with distinction.
Both things were true at once, and the marker says so. Stop and read the whole thing. Navigate to the Texas Germans in the Civil War marker in New Braunfels, TX.
The Great Hanging at Gainesville
North Texas produced the worst of it. The marker at 734 E. California Street in Gainesville is titled The Great Hanging at Gainesville, 1862, and it does not soften the count.
In the fall of 1862, Cooke County residents feared invasion from the north and a Unionist uprising at home. Word spread of a "Peace Party" of Union sympathizers. Spies joined it and reported names. On the morning of October 1, 1862, arrests began across the county "by authority of the people of Cooke County." Colonel W. C. Young presided over a meeting that established a Citizens Court and appointed a committee to pick a jury.
Sixty-eight men went before that court. It convicted 39 of conspiracy and insurrection and hanged them the same day. Three more requested court martial, got it, and hanged by its order. Two broke from their guard, and the guards shot them dead. The Legislature later appropriated $4,500 for rations and forage used by state troops during the unrest.
Go to 734 E. California St, Gainesville, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
One of the hanged men has his own marker south of town. Clark Cemetery was started by the Hatcher family in the 1850s and took the Clark name by the war. Nathaniel Miles Clark moved his wife Mahuldah and their children there in the 1850s. The mob lynched him in the Great Hanging, and his is the earliest marked grave on the grounds. The cemetery still holds German language headstones, obelisks, and stone curbing. Descendants have maintained it since 1939, and the state designated it a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2009.
Find it at the Clark Cemetery marker near Gainesville, TX.
Sixty miles southwest, in Wise County, a marker for Dr. M. W. Matthews near Paradise records a near miss. Matthews treated Sam Houston's wound at San Jacinto in 1836. He served in the First and Seventh Congresses of the Republic, then fought in the Mexican War. He stayed a firm Unionist through the Civil War and, in the marker's words, once barely escaped hanging at the hands of Southern vigilantes. He founded churches across the state and died in 1891 at 84.
Navigate to the Dr. M. W. Matthews marker near Paradise, TX.
The Unionists Who Came Back to Govern
Sam Houston lost his job over this fight. The Secession Convention made every officeholder swear loyalty to the Confederacy. Houston refused. On March 16, 1861, the convention declared his office vacant. Two other Texas Unionists outlasted him, and both have markers on 11th Street in Austin.
Governor Andrew Jackson Hamilton got the nickname "Colossal Jack" for his size and his speaking. Born in Alabama in 1815, he reached Texas around 1846 and served as acting Attorney General in 1850. He donated the land that became the State Cemetery. Voters sent him to Congress in 1859. He took a Unionist stand during the secession crisis alongside Houston, and it forced him out of Texas in 1862. Lincoln commissioned him a brigadier general and Military Governor of Texas that November. He had almost no power until federal troops occupied Brownsville in January 1865. He served as Provisional Governor from June 17, 1865 to August 9, 1866.
Governor Edmund Jackson Davis commanded a regiment of Texas Unionists during the war and rose to brigadier general. He beat Hamilton for the governorship in November 1869, in an election clouded by fraud charges. He took office that January, and Texas rejoined the Union in March 1870. His term drew steady criticism over the state police force and alleged corruption, and steady praise for funding free public education.
The last act is the part people forget. Davis lost re-election to Democrat Richard Coke in December 1873 and refused to go. From January 13 to January 17, 1874, Davis held the first floor of the Capitol while Coke and the 14th Legislature held the second. President Grant declined to send help, and Davis walked out.
Both markers stand near 11th Street on the Capitol grounds in Austin, TX. Find them in RoadHistorical before your visit.
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Most of these markers sit on rural highway shoulders with no sign warning you they're coming. Discovery Mode solves that. It runs while you drive and notifies you as you approach a marker. You get the chance to pull over instead of finding out three counties later.
The AI Tour Guide handles the questions the plaque leaves open. A Citizens Court hanged 39 men in one day, and the marker never explains who Colonel Young was or what happened to the jurors. Ask, and you get an answer at the roadside. Offline mode keeps all of it working in the Hill Country and along the Red River, where cell coverage drops out for long stretches.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
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