Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Civil War & Reconstruction
The US Civil War (1861-65) was brought on by a number of issues, including states rights,
but standing in the foreground was the moral and economic debate over slavery. Settlers
poured into Texas from slave-owning states in the South, but Governor Sam Houston was
firmly against the South-favored secession. Popular opinion and a referendum defeated
him, and he was forced to resign.
Texas seceded from the USA and joined the Confederate States of America on March 16,
1861. Aside from providing an estimated 80,000 troops, Texas' role in the Civil War was
mainly one of supplying food to the Confederate war machine. Even if Texas soil did not
play a large part in the war, the wounds ran incredibly deep for years afterward.
President Andrew Johnson, the Southerner and former slaveholder who succeeded Lin-
coln, devised a Reconstruction plan. While his plan granted many concessions, it was abso-
lutely firm that the states' constitutions ratify the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, be-
fore re-admittance. The Texas Constitution of 1866, hastily drawn up to assure re-admit-
tance to the Union, granted African Americans some measure of civil rights, but it did not
give them the right to vote until martial law imposed it. Hyper-restrictive Black Codes,
later to be expanded to what became known as Jim Crow laws, were introduced, making it
illegal for African Americans to be unemployed, restricting freedom of movement and se-
gregating much of Southern life into white and African American camps.
In 1519, Alonzo Avarez de Piñeda mapped the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Mexico, creating
the first cartographic record of present-day Texas. He camped at the mouth of the Rio Grande (which he
called the 'river of palms').
On the Cattle Trail
During the Civil War, the Confederate forces' need for food had increased Texas cattle pro-
duction. Ranching in Texas became an enormous business, and cattle drives - the herding
of up to 200,000 head of longhorn steers northward - were born.
Of all the trails that ran through Texas, the evocatively named Goodnight-Loving Trail to
Pueblo and Denver, Colorado, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Sedalia Trail to Sedalia,
Missouri, are the most famous. But it was the Chisholm Trail - through San Antonio to
Abilene, Kansas, at the western terminus of the Kansas Pacific Railroad - that really
