Unveiling the Civil War in Texas | Blockade Runners, Epic Battles, and Juneteenth

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Ed Cotham's Books: https://www.edcotham.com/

This episode comes from the Rosenberg Library Conversation series where J.R. Shaw sat down with historians to talk about some interesting historical events and people in Galveston and Texas history. Thanks to the Rosenberg Library for allowing Galveston Unscripted to hold live podcast conversations in the library. This conversation series was such a great experience and we captured some awesome interviews.

Mr. Ed Cotham retired in 2023 as the Chief Investment Officer of the Terry Foundation, the largest private source of scholarships at Texas universities. He holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Houston, a Masters Degree in Economics from the University of Chicago, and a Law Degree from the University of Texas. Ed is an active member of various historical organizations, including the Houston Civil War Round Table, the Civil War Preservation Trust, and the Society of Civil War Historians. He has received several awards for his volunteer service and contributions to preserving Civil War heritage, including the Frank C. Vandiver Award of Merit and the Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize. Ed is also an accomplished author, with notable works such as "Battle on the Bay: the Civil War Struggle for Galveston" and "Sabine Pass: the Confederacy's Thermopylae." With his expertise and passion for history, Ed Cotham is a distinguished figure in the field of Civil War preservation and an engaging guest in this live conversation and podcast!

Transcript

Ed Cotham: 0:04

I got interested in some Irishmen that were fighting there during the Battle of Galveston on the artillery side. Blockade running was a big thing here in Galveston. I knew that a civil war battle, an important battle, had taken place here in 1863. I would say, you're not gonna believe this, but this is where Juneteenth actually originated. I had a lot of people on my tours that would say, June, what? They had never heard of it.

J.R.: 0:31

Welcome to Galveston Unscripted. This episode comes from the Rosenberg Library Conversation series where I sat down with a few historians to talk about some extremely interesting historical facts about Galveston and Texas history. I would like to personally thank the Rosenberg Library for allowing Galveston Unscripted to hold live podcast conversations in the library. This conversation series was such a great experience and I really look forward to picking it up again in the fall of 2023. And a very huge thank you to our guests. Now this episode with Mr. Ed Cotham is about an hour long, but trust me, you are gonna wanna stick around and listen through the entire thing. We discussed the Civil War in Texas, and the Battle of Galveston and some other historical aspects of the 1860s here in Texas.

J.R. (2): 1:21

Check the link in the description for the direct links to the books that our guest has written. If this is your first time listening to Galveston Unscripted, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. If you've listened or watched before and you enjoy the content we are putting out in audio and video, please make sure to like, subscribe and review the podcast. Leave us a review, leave us a rating. It really helps other people find what we are doing here at Galveston Unscripted. Your rating and review helps other people find Galveston Unscripted and discover the amazing history of our little island. And be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all those social media platforms.

J.R.: 2:02

without further ado, let's hop into this episode with Mr. Ed Cotham. Hi everybody. If you guys don't know me, my name is JR. I started Galveston Unscripted, a podcast about, um, it was July of 2021 and I started it in my closet. Uh, and started building audio guides that paired with my running tour. Um, so I started recording these audio guides and then started interviewing people, and it's just kind of grown and expanded, and I am so honored to be able to sit here at the Rosenberg library and sit with people like Ed and discuss our city and Texas, and, um, how the island that we live on is just such an important piece of history in this, in this state and in this country. So, um, thank y'all so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Well, without any further ado, um, I just wanna introduce our, our guest this evening, Mr. Ed Cotham. Um, you have a, a pretty long bio here, so I'm just gonna hit the highlights. All right. So Ed retired in 2023 as a Chief Investment Officer of the Terry Foundation in Houston. The Terry Foundation is the largest private sector or private source of scholarships in at Texas universities. Ed holds an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Houston and a master's degree in economics from the University of Chicago. Ed returned to Texas to obtain a law degree from the University of Texas. Ed is the is the, a former president of the Houston Civil War Roundtable and is active in the Civil War preservation Movement. In 2011, ed received the President's award for distinguished volunteer service from the Galveston Historical Foundation. He is a life member of the Civil War Preservation Trust. Uh, he has plenty of Civil War awards and awards from all over the country. Um, so I'm just gonna list off a few of his books here. Uh, his published works include Battle on the Bay, the Civil War Struggle for Galveston, which we will discuss a little bit about today. Sabine pass, the Confederacy's ther monopoly, the Southern journey of a Civil War Marine, the illustrated notebook of Henry O Gusley. A busy week in Texas. Ulysses s Grant's 1880, visit to the Lone Star State and Juneteenth the story behind the celebration. All right, so am I missing anything, ed? I don't think so. Okay, gotcha. All right. So Ed, um, he's been on my podcast before and we discussed the Battle of Galveston. Um, and I, I really wanted to dive into a little bit of Ed's background and how he got into, um, how he got into Civil War history in the first place. So, ed, could you tell us how you got into Civil War history and how you, how you got into Galveston

Ed Cotham: 4:46

history? Sure. JR I'm delighted to be here the this evening to, to talk with you about one of my favorite subjects, which is Civil War Things connected with Galveston. I got interested in the Civil War very early, and I can remember my mother taking me particularly to the Vicksburg Battlefield because we had some family over that way. Uh, early on in life and I got really interested in civil war history in that connection. But, you know, coming back to Texas, we didn't have much in the way of civil war battlefields that you could visit, at least at that time. And I, I didn't really keep that, that, uh, interest as fresh as I could until I got to college. And then I got hooked on, uh, a couple of books, particularly Bruce Catton's history of, of the Civil War and, and got back into it. And then eventually I started wondering what, what happened in Texas during the Civil War? And my wife and I had a weekend place down here in Galveston. And so I actually came here to the Rosenberg library at the time and I went up to the Galveston, Texas History Center, which, uh, I, I will say with without reservation, as one of the great archives in the United States to research anything connected with history and. I was up there and I, and I went up to, to one of the archivists at the time, and I said, I'd like to see the book on the Battle of Galveston, because I knew that a civil war battle, an important battle, had taken place here in January of 1863. And the archivist at that time said, well, hate to tell you, but there's not really one. And I said, there's not one that's, that's hard to imagine. And I kept waiting, waiting, figuring that somebody out there had to be writing a book on this important battle. Well, five years went by and nobody did. And I finally said, you know, this is interesting enough. I'm just gonna do this. And so it took me five years to research and write my first book, which was on the Battle of Galveston. The University of Texas Press was kind enough to actually publish that book. And I got hooked on it. And it's, it's the way this works. And I know there are a number of authors here in the room that will tell you the same thing. When you're working on a project like that, you see something interesting. And in the case of the, of the Battle of Galveston, I got interested in some little, uh, Irishmen that were fighting there during the Battle of Galveston on the artillery side. And I, I knew that they had something to do with the Battle of Sabine Pass. So I followed them over and wrote a book on the Battle of Sabine Pass. And while I was writing the book in the Battle of Sabine Pass, I got interested in the ships that were used by the union in that battle and the, the Battle of Galveston. So I followed that out to the southern journey of a Civil War Marine. And it's kind of snowballed since then. And as many of you know, I've gotten to where I give a lot of tours of Civil War, Galveston, particularly around the battles anniversary at the beginning of January of 1863. And as I would leave people around this city, it always struck me that there were some things that I would point to that didn't have historic markers to do with it, and nobody had ever really covered. And in particular, I remember going by. This lot at the corner of 22nd and Strand and I would point to the parking lot and say something incredibly important happened on this site of this parking lot. And I would say, you're not gonna believe this, but this is where Juneteenth actually originated. And people at the time, now I've been doing this for all close to 40 years, and I would give these tours and back in the early days I had a lot of people on my tours that would say, June, what? They had never heard of it. And then I would get people that they would say, you mean that thing that happened where they have like barbecues and parades and stuff? And I would say, yeah, but it has a whole lot more to do with it than that. That's, that's not really the story at all. And I kind of kept waiting for somebody to write a book that really covered what actually happened in Galveston on June 19th, 1865. And kinda like my first book, nobody really did. And so I finally got up the nerve to actually write that book, and it came out in jr. You know, this, it, it came out and I, this was absolute dumb luck, but it came out and then three weeks later they declared it a national holiday. So, you know, that that's, that's kind of one of those things you can't predict. And I've, I've been threatening to write a book on Arbor Day just to kind of cover the rest of the holidays. But, but as you can see, I've gotten really interested in, in Galveston and, and Texas history in the Civil War. It kind of followed that thread all through my work.

J.R.: 9:29

All right. That's great. Um, so I would like to take a, a high level view of Texas entering the Civil War and the decisions behind Texas entering the Civil War and hone in on Galveston. So could you give us a brief overview of, I guess, the decision for Texas to enter the Civil War?

Ed Cotham: 9:49

Sure. Uh, I mean, Texas is the seventh state to join the Confederacy, so Texas is by no means the first to do that. South Carolina, of course, comes out, uh, uh, of the gate swinging, uh, very heavy. And Texas was kind of, took kind of a measured approach. And I think in large part, that was due to the leadership in Texas at that time. And in particular, Sam Houston. Sam Houston did not at all favor, uh, secession he, he was really opposed to that. Uh, and he fought that as long and as hard as he could. He delayed having a secession convention like everywhere else. And when it came, he saw to it with some, some people there that in instead of Texas just voting to leave at a convention, that they put it up to a popular vote and all that kind of delayed Texas leaving the union and, and going in favor of the south. And there was also a question. It, it was not just a question of whether Texas would leave the union. There was also the question of what Texas would leave the union for, because there was, we'd been a republic, the Republic of Texas was still an option, and I think maybe Sam Houston in the back of his mind still had some sort of idea that if Texas left the union, maybe they would go back into a republic or something, that they didn't need to join the rest of the cotton South at that time. And so that was very delayed and finally happened. But we did have this vote. The interesting thing to me about the way that we left, uh, the union was, if you look at the vote now, it's, it's very heavily in favor of secession. Most places, although there are some counties, particularly where there are large German population or you know, immigrant populations where secession did not, did not pass a lot. Galveston was not one of those places. Galveston voted heavily in favor of secession and at first you kind of wonder what were those people thinking? Because Galveston was the largest port in Texas growing at the rate of 50% per year. It was an insane place to be commercially at the outset before the war began. And almost as soon as the war began, of course, uh, the Union blockades Galveston. And so Galveston ends up being commercially hurt worse than any other place in the state during the balance of the Civil War. So it didn't work out for Galveston very well, at least during the war. Uh, but you know, that's sort of the, the whole operation throughout the war is everybody's trying to, to find their place in it. And, uh, I think that Texas is, is slow to join the Confederacy, but they're very enthusiastic when they do. And if you look at the number of troops that Texas provided as a percentage of the adult white population, it's very, very high and compares with anywhere else in the Confederacy.

J.R.: 12:51

So you mentioned that, uh, Galveston was economically, uh, hurt by entering the, entering the Civil War. And, um, so I know Galveston was blockade by the Union and Galveston, and one question I get very often is about the Blockade runners, uh, here leaving Galveston and running that cotton out of the port of Galveston. Could you tell us a little bit about Blockade Runners, and do you, if you know any of the tactics that they used?

Ed Cotham: 13:19

Sure. Blockade running was a big thing here in Galveston. And, and think about it this way, at the end of the Civil War, Galveston was the last major Confederate port anywhere. Anywhere in the Confederate states. And so as the war went on and the union blockade became more and more effective elsewhere in the Confederacy, in places like New Orleans are captured, and eventually mobile is captured, and Savannah is captured in places like that, the number of available ports for the confederacy to get things out. And in particular cotton, to get cotton out to some of these places and trade that for high luxury goods or, or weapons, it becomes increasingly restricted. And so blockade running at the outset of the war in Galveston was easy, frankly. Uh, there, they didn't have many ships that were dedicated down here. The ships that were dedicated to the Galveston blockade. Uh, were relatively old and effective, and almost anybody could block run the blockade. At the beginning of the war, as the blockade intensified and became more concentrated off the entrance to Galveston Bay, the Galveston blockade runners had to get more sophisticated as well. And so we started having a number of ships that were purpose built to run the blockade in, in the in, usually they were built in England or somewhere abroad, and these things were steamers, but they were very low in the water, long kind of cigar shaped things with very little relief above the water. And they were painted gray so they wouldn't stand out to the union blockade ships. They would pile those ships as high as they could with cotton. And in Galveston, the way they did it was they went to the top of a building, a high building, and the building almost universally chosen, was one that still stands today, the Henley building. At the corner of 20th and Strand and the blockade runner captains would wait until there was a particularly advantageous night. Usually when it was hazy, maybe stormy, that sort of thing. Maybe foggy as we get from time to time, they'd wait for those nights and then just before it got dark, they'd run to the roof of the Henley building and they'd sketch where all these union blockading ships were on a, on a map and they'd figure out, it's like football you're running where there's no defense. Right? And so they would run down just as it was getting dark, jump onto their ship. They'd already have the steam ready and they'd paddle out and run outta Galveston Harbor and running outta Galveston Harbor with that kind of preparation was enormously successful. I think at least 90% of the ships running out of of Galveston were successful, probably for almost the entire course. The war, we have a number of blockade, runner wrecks around Galveston, but most of those are not people going out. There are people coming in because again, if you're coming into Galveston, you had a whole different approach. You couldn't go to the top of the Henley building and figure out where everybody was. What you had to do was probably wait until it was just about dawn, and then find a place where you could kind of squeeze in closer to the coast for the union blockades and sneak into one of the channels. And a lot of these blockade runner captains didn't have a whole lot of familiarity with Galveston waters, and they're really treacherous to begin with. So kind of squeezing into some of those channels coming in, uh, closer to the shore meant that some of these ran aground, and particularly like one, like the Denbigh ran a, ran a ground not too far from where the jetty is today. And that was a tricky operation, and that's where the, the blockade, uh, kind of failed sometimes and resulted in these wrecks. But keep in mind, this was enormously profitable if you could run out of the blockade in Galveston. Probably going out one way and coming back with a cargo, you would probably pay for your entire ship on that one voyage. And it was enormously profitable to do this. So that's why it, as, as the war went on, more and more blockade runners were coming into Galveston. And by 1864, frankly, uh, the accounts of the newspapers say that anything that could float then was basically being used, uh, to paddle out to sea and take cotton as far as they could get it, and, and, and take it to a place where they, where they could sell it. Now, some of the traffic would overland into Mexico, but a lot of it came outta Galveston on these blockade runners and not just Galveston. It was also the case of Sabine Pass, uh, Matagorda Bay in a number of other places. But Galveston was the center of blockade running here.

J.R.: 18:00

Okay, so let's get into it. Uh, October of 1862, uh, the Union Navy sales into Galveston. Without a fight. And they're, you know, they're docked on, uh, along Galveston from October to December 31st, 1862. Um, what goes on, I'll, I'm just gonna let you go with that one. Let's, let's, can we hop right into the Battle of Galveston and the events leading up to,

Ed Cotham: 18:27

so as you say, uh, Galveston was basically surrendered to the union in October of 1862 without a fight. They fired one gun and then retreat to the mainland because the general in charge of Texas at the time was a, a guy named Paul Octave Hébert who was a former governor, Louisiana West Pointer. He looked at a map and said, you know, there's no way to defend an island that's just silly. Uh, if we're gonna defend this place, we just need to defend it on the mainland. And ultimately he built a big fort over there, kind of where the causeway reaches the mainland today. And that was called Fort Hébert in his honor. But the, in, in the fall of 1862, the Confederate leadership in Richmond, uh, response to the people of Texas who are just infuriated by this decision to abandon in Galveston Island. And they send down here a very unique individual, uh, general John Bankhead Magruder. Notice Prince John in the old army. And, uh, Magruder was the, probably the most unconventional general of the entire Civil War. And he gets down here and decides that not only is he going to try to recapture the city of Galveston, but he's gonna do it almost immediately. So he gets to Houston in November of 1862, and he launches one of the wildest battle plans of the entire Civil War on New Year's Eve between. December, uh, 31st of 1862, January 1st, 1863. And it's gonna have all kinds of wild elements. He's gonna have, uh, he's gonna sneak, uh, guns over to the, to from mainland over the railroad bridge, take them to the waterfront and fire them out at the ships in the harbor, that he's gonna have a waiting charge against some of the union troops that are on a wharf. And then he's gonna have some improvised gunboats that he's made out of, of cotton steamboats coming from Houston. Then he loads up with big bales of cotton and all this is gonna happen in the middle of the night, and almost all of it goes dead wrong. I mean, you could not imagine a plan going absolutely worse, but in the end he is gets absolutely dumb lucky. And the union does some things that are even stupider. And so at the end of the evening, Uh, the, the federal warship that's in charge of Galveston, that, that, that's under the command of, of, uh, Commodore William b Renshaw, managed to run itself a ground out there on, on Pelican spit in the middle of, of, uh, Galveston Harbor. And they decide they have to blow it up to keep it outta Confederate hands. They set the explosives and blow it up, but it blows up too soon and kills Commodore Red Shaw in his entire, uh, crew on that, that boat. And so what's left of the Union fleet kind of limps out of Galveston Harbor and the wildest battle plan in the Civil War that went wrong, almost from the beginning ends up succeeding. And so Galveston becomes the only major port city that the union ever captured. And then the Confederates recaptured from the union. It's, it becomes one of the, uh, shining success stories of the Confederacy, and then they decide they're going. Put, uh, defenses around the island and, and put fortifications around the island. And Galveston will last all the way until June of 1865. And Galveston will become the last major port, and Texas will end up being the most successfully defended Confederate states. And it's, it's really a remarkable achievement given how little the Confederacy had to work with here. So one thing that I

J.R.: 22:11

know interest, uh, a lot of my listeners and, and people I talk to pretty often are the cotton clads. And when I explained to them about how they stacked compressed cotton around these cotton clads and how that was maybe not enough armor, but it was armor, nonetheless, um, they're shocked that that was even done or even used. Um, could you tell us a little bit about the cotton clads, the process, the thinking and the recruiting for the cotton clads?

Ed Cotham: 22:39

Sure. Well, keep in mind, I, I mentioned General Magruder. General Magruder was in charge of the Confederate army on the peninsula leading up to Richmond in 1862. So he is there when the ironclad monitor in the ironclad Virginia fight there at Hampton Roads. And he watches that whole thing with these iron clads. Now he's gonna come down to Texas and, you know, he'd like to build some iron clads himself, but we don't have enough iron around here to really do that. And he doesn't have the, the operation to do that. So he looks around and says, what do we have a lot of? And it turns out that they have a whole bunch of cotton sitting here that can't get out and waiting for, uh, you know, an exit strategy on blockade runners, et cetera. And so he says, maybe we can use this cotton as the armament for our ships. And so they'll take two big river steamers, the Bayou City and the Neptune number two. And they will put these cotton bales all along the upper structures of these vessels to provide some armament. And in particular for the men that are behind that armament, because Magruder expects that coming down in the middle of the night to attack the union fleet. He's, he's not probably gonna be able to disable those ships with the, few cannon that are on these ships. He's gonna actually have to run them, run into them and send over boarding parties. So he finds some men up kind of near College Station, frankly, and they're part of the Sibley Brigade. And he, these, these men are dismounted, cavalry, uh, troops. And he asks if they will participate and become part of the, the boarding parties on these two Confederate cotton clad ships. And they say they will. And so, uh, general Tom Greens, uh, agrees to have them do this, and so they will become known in Galveston lore as the horse Marines. Because they were cavalrymen that were serving as Marines on board these, these cotton clad ships. The interesting part about that is when you trace down where these men came from, a lot of them were German, uh, troops that spoke very little English up from the hill country. And if you look at it, the, the look at the accounts, these men, when they volunteered to serve onboard these cotton clads, many of these men had never been on a ship before. And the accounts say that some of these men had never even seen a ship before. So they had a very interesting service as Marines in the middle of the night onboard these, these cotton clads. I might also mention what we're talking about cotton armor. One of the really unique things about the battle of Galveston is the use of cotton artillery because General Magruder was not only interested in using cotton on board these steam ships, he also had brought down a very large naval gun, a Dahlgren. On a railroad car. And they brought that over to, uh, the city of Galveston, kind of near where the railroad museum is today. And they brought that over and it was armored with cotton bales. And he had done the same thing in Virginia at a battle called Savage's Station. Uh, but he'd used iron on that occasion with railroad iron. And they called that that railroad car with the iron, the land Merry back because it was, uh, kind of an iron clad thing. But he did that again in Galveston Arbor with, with cotton. What's interesting about that is that that is the in Virginia was the very first rail mounted artillery that had ever been used in battle. And the battle Galveston is only the second time in history that, that, uh, that that, uh, configuration was used. And as I'm sure we'll talk about later, that's, that's sort of the precursor to some other technology that, uh, Magruder and his people were experimenting with here down in Texas.

J.R.: 26:32

All right. So I definitely want to cover, you know, towards the end of this, I want to cover Juneteenth and, and some of the other things you're working on. So, to kind of tie up the Battle of Galveston, one story that you told me that's very, very moving, um, is the Edward and Albert Lea story. Could you tell us that story and kind of, you know, bring in all the details and paint us a picture of what that would've been like?

Ed Cotham: 26:58

So you always hear the stories about the Civil War that, you know, father fought against son or brother, fought against brother and everything, but usually you don't actually hear cases of where that actually happened. But we have a documented case of that here in Galveston. And what happened was this, when General Magruder was getting ready to launch his battle plan here at Texas, there were a number of officers down in the area that volunteered to serve on his staff. And one of the officers who volunteered to serve was a man named Albert Lea, l e a. And Albert Lea had been at West Point with Magruder. Magruder knew him very well. He was a very experienced man. And so during the battle of Galveston, Albert Lee was kind of his eyes and ears, and in particular, he went to the top of one of the tall buildings near Magruder s headquarters. Magruder's headquarters were where the Sealy mansion is today at basically at 25th and Broadway, about a block from here and the tall building that Lee went up on to spy. What was happening during the battle was almost certainly the building that we call Ashton Villa today. But Lee is watching the battle develop, and at the end of the battle, one of the pivotal moments is when these, these confederate cotton plaids ram and seize control of a union ship called the Harriet Lane, which was probably the best ship in Galveston Harbor on that day. Now unbeknownst, uh, to Albert Lea. The first officer on board the union ship, uh, Harriet Lane was his son, Edward Lee, and they had not spoken since before the war because they were pretty well estranged by, as you can imagine, by the, the, the oncoming of the war. But this was a battle in which father literally fought against son Confederates versus the union. At the conclusion of the battle, Albert hurries over to the waterfront because he knows his son was on probably one of these ships. He's rode out to the, the Harriet Lane, goes on board it and finds his son mortally wounded on the deck of that vessel. He runs over the two are briefly reunited and uh, Albert goes away trying to find some medical attention to, to try and help his his boy and he leaves. And as he's gone, the, the surgeons, which is both the confederate and the union surgeon by this point, go keep going over to the young officer and saying, uh, uh, Edward Lee, is there anything we can do? Is there anything we can do to help you? And Edward keeps asserting over and over again, no, my father is here. My father is here. He will die, uh, in that, in that battle. And the next day, um, a remarkable thing happens over in the cemetery complex that you see today over on Broadway. It's in the Trinity Episcopal Cemetery there, kind of in the southeast portion of that cemetery complex. And what they do is they decide to bury, uh, Edward Lee and his, his, uh, captain, uh, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright they, they're gonna bury'em both at a ceremony. And it's remarkable because they assemble the union prisoners that they have, quite a few of them, Massachusetts troops. And they assemble those union prisoners and the Confederates in the area. And then Albert Lee reads the Episcopal burial Service over the grave of his son. And Jonathan Wainwright was a mason. So the local masons say that since he was a basin, we're gonna bury him with Masonic honors. And so there's a Masonic ceremony with the Confederate, uh, reading the, uh, burial service over his son. And it's a, it's a very respectful thing where people just came together on one occasion and, and honored somebody who had, had made a, uh, the sacrificed their life. And the neat thing about that is if you go there today, there's just a little burial marker. It's a very simple thing. It says, Edward Lee, uh, killed January 1st, 1863 Galveston and has a little broken anchor on the top of it. And then it says down at the bottom, my father is here. And to me, you know, that that may be the best Civil War marker or monument I could ever think of because of the story behind it and the story of reconciliation that kind of starts there the day after the Battle of Galveston. And it's kind of still something we're all coming to grips with today.

J.R.: 31:27

Before we move on to Juneteenth and, uh, built, you know, coming into that entire story here in Galveston, is there anything else you would like to cover that I may have missed to ask you about the Battle of Galveston that you particularly like to, uh, let people know about?

Ed Cotham: 31:43

No, I think the, the, the interesting thing is there are very few battles, uh, where the, the Confederates have joint operations where you have a land part and an and a sea part. And when you consider the General Magruder came down here from Virginia with absolutely nothing. To in a month put together an assault that involves artillery pieces, soldiers, and improvised gunboats, and then have it work has to be one of the wildest stories of the entire Civil War. And usually I, I've given this talk all across the country, now, and, you know, when I'm up in a place like Chicago, I usually preface it by saying, I'm gonna tell you about the battle of Galveston. It's the wildest thing in the entire Civil War. And I can see these audiences kind of leaning back and say, oh, okay. Yeah. And then I've had many people come up afterwards and say, you know, you told that story and that was the wildest battle of the Civil War. And you know, it's just kind of remarkable. We have that kind of thing here and it, it's, it's worth a a lot of, uh, study, I think.

J.R.: 32:49

Okay. So we are nearing the end of the Civil War. Um, we're in June of 1865. What is it like here in Galveston and can you tell us what is about to happen? What is, what is coming up?

Ed Cotham: 33:05

Okay. Again, Galveston's the last major confederate port anywhere, and it's really, you know, Texas is gonna be the last major state to, to surrender of the war. And so everybody can kind of see what happen, but nobody really knows what is going to happen in terms of how this transition is going to work. And it's worked out very poorly all around the south because the, the end of the war doesn't come with any kind of negotiated settlement. There won't be any kind of arrangement for how the transition's gonna happen between a, a brand new government. There's no transition between again, particularly slavery and emancipation and who's gonna take care of these people and what's gonna happen to'em and how all that's gonna be be happening. I mean, general Grant and Lee basically kind of cut the framework for what's gonna happen with these giant Confederate armies. There's not gonna be any negotiation between governments. General Grant is just gonna say, all right, you can go home and you can take a few pieces of, of, uh, property with you, but you just go home and that's it. Nothing's ever negotiated. And so as we get closer to the end of the war for Galveston, we're gonna be sort of the last bastion of the Confederacy down here. And by my count, there are, by this point, well over 250,000 enslaved people in Texas. And Texas is not like the other Confederate states. In, in the other Confederate states. You've had union armies marching back and forth through them all the time. And so a lot of the enslaved people get freed incidentally as part of that or escaped that sort of thing. That does not happen in Texas. So you, you have Texas having the last large pocket. Of enslaved individuals in the entire Confederacy, and nobody is quite sure how that's gonna work out. And Galveston in particular, as the end approaches, it becomes incredibly chaotic. The people of Galveston kind of start returning to the city as they can kind of start getting ready to resume, uh, the operation of the city. They come back to find their city devastated. So you got people trying to rebuild, you've got crime everywhere. I mean, the, the law and order is just completely out of hand down here. In addition to that, you have prisoners that are being returned, uh, on a daily basis. Large numbers of people, including the main, uh, force of Hoods, Texas brigade, come in almost the day before Juneteenth. You have hoards of people coming into the state in addition to large groups of federal troops. So Galveston, which was never really set up for this kind of population, is suddenly just. Beset with this entire population of people and into this gigantic mess of chaos. They go, are going to send, uh, major General Gordon Granger and his staff, and he's gonna arrive on the morning of June 19th, 1865, uh, with some very specific instructions about what to do.

J.R.: 36:11

Well, I'm just gonna pass this right back to you. So, all right. What were those specific instructions?

Ed Cotham: 36:20

So this is a detective story that I went through in writing the book on June 10th because I, I don't know if you've done this like I have, but, uh, every June 19th in the newspaper, they would, they would. Put some, a story in there about what happened in Galveston on June 19th, and it usually would say something like, you know, general Granger went on the top of a balcony and read an order and told everybody that they were free, and, and that was, that was Juneteenth. And the order that they were quote, it would just have one sentence that all slaves are free. And I thought, you know, that, that sounds odd. I wonder what the rest of that order says. So I, I actually looked up the original order and read it, and it consists of four sentences. The first of which does say, you know, in accordance with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, all slaves are free. The the third and fourth sentence, I'll talk about in a moment. The third and fourth sentence says, okay, even though you're free, we want you to stay right where you are and keep working for the same old people. For now, we'll get back to you. This freedom thing, we'll get back to you. But right now, stay exactly where you are. Keep doing what you're doing. And I said, okay, now I know why they don't print the rest of that, that order in the newspaper, because it's really kind of insulting if you look at it on in modern terms. And then you go to the second sentence of that order and the second sentence of the order is incredibly beautiful. It says, uh, freedom means absolutely equality and absolute equality means a complete, you know, equality between uh, people of all, you know, it's a definition of what absolute equality means. And I says, boy, this does not sound like it was written by the same person because you've got this boiler plate thing about freedom at the first, these insulting two sentences at the end and this beautiful thing in the middle. And so again, I've worked on this for 40 years and when I finally figured it all out, what happened was, Over in Louisiana. They, they had the same problem that we were fixing to have. They sent a general up to Shreveport to take over from the Confederates up there. And Shreveport was a complete mess. They'd had flooding, uh, their, their crops were failing and, and they had huge numbers of enslaved people who now learned they were free and they were coming to the city and they were talking to the people that, from the army that had arrived and say, well, now that you've freed me, now you've gotta feed me. And they didn't have the supplies to do that. So it was, it was a complete humanitarian crisis up there in Louisiana. And so a general named Francis Herron decided, you know, I don't know what to do, but what we've gotta do is tell these people to go home and stay where they are. And so he issued this order saying, you gotta go home and stay where you are. And that order was given, a copy of that order was given to General Sheridan, Phil Sheridan, who was coming down into Orleans to take over the entire operation down in this part of the South. General Sheridan didn't, didn't like what Herron had done, but he knew there was really no alternative. And so he gave that order to General Granger and his staff and said, when you get to Galveston, basically issue an order telling them that all slaves are free, but telling them that they've gotta stay where they are for the time being. So when Granger comes over to Galveston, that order is almost a, a dead match for what General Sheridan told him to issue, which was based on what had happened to Louisiana. So what about that second sentence? The thing about Absolutely. Quality, which again, is beautiful. No, no other order in the, in the entire, uh, end of the war is like that. It's very unique. Where does that come from? It always bothered me. And then one day I just got one of those moments, kinda like Homer Simpson said"doh" you know, where, what I realized General Granger didn't even sign the Juneteenth order when you get the original, which I did. And look at it. He didn't even sign the order. This was signed by one of his staff officers, a man named Frederick W. Emery. And when I looked up Frederick W. Emery and, and researched him, I think I was probably the first person to figure this out. Emory was a very unique individual. He'd been a newspaper editor of an abolitionist newspaper in Kansas before the war. He'd actually come from the northeast, from somewhere up in New England. But he'd settled in, in Kansas, become an abolitionist newspaper editor. He'd been a member of the legislature there. He joined the seventh Kansas, uh, which was a cavalry regiment. And his commanding officer, do you know who his commanding officer was? It was the son of John Brown, the Martyr. And these guys, this company that he joined was hardcore abolitionists. These people would have meetings and at the end they would sing the John Brown song and vowed to avenge him. So this guy was really anti-slavery. And just by chance he ended up on General Granger's staff at the end of the war. And I'm sure he got handed this, this order from General Sheridan saying, say this when you get there. And he put the first sentence in the last two sentences there and he said, you know, nobody told me what to put in the middle of this. And he kind of used his editorial discretion and put that beautiful sentence in there. And to us modern people, that's the only thing in the Juneteenth order that really resonates and speaks to us today. So if you go down to the Strand and see that beautiful mural there at 22nd and Strand where I used to show people there's a parking lot of nothing else. Now you've got the Juneteenth mural there and what's the name of that mural? Absolute Equality. And it has that beautiful sentence from the Juneteenth order that was inserted by this very young staff officer on General Granger staff. And I don't know the General Granger ever even saw that order. There's no indication that he did, he certainly didn't sign it. Uh, but Major Emory did. And, uh, we end up having the basis for a national holiday in this order that just because of the way it was written and the way it was issued, got read to lots of people, got lots of attention, and ended up being celebrated in, in a kind of a strange way. But to me, it's appropriate that, uh, the war ends with something that, that has such a, a, a beautiful resonating phrase to it. I'm glad we can celebrate it here.

J.R.: 42:43

I'm definitely gonna leave time for questions at the end. So we've got a few minutes left. So I wanna move on to some of your, uh, projects that you are working on now. Are you working on anything now? Because I know you've got a handful of books and you're always doing something. I want to hear about

Ed Cotham: 42:56

what you got going on. Okay, I'll, I'll tell you this, uh, the, this, I'll tell you kind of a spoiler thing for what I'm, I'm doing now. It's probably the wildest book I've ever written. The working title. This book is called Rockets, tanks and Submarines. The, uh, story about the confederate, uh, innovations in Texas, because you may be surprised to learn that, uh, Texans actually experimented during the Civil War with rockets. And we actually had a, a dedicated rocket core that functioned down here in between Galveston and Houston. And this is a hundred years before the Johnson Space Center comes to Texas. Now, it didn't work out very well, but they were certainly experimenting with rockets, tanks. Uh, you know, I mentioned tanks earlier on. Uh, General Magruder was, was working with, uh, he had the Land merry backup in Virginia. He experimented with a cotton, uh, gun, railroad gun at the Battle of Galveston. He didn't stop there. At the end of the war, uh, we, we have records that they were actually working on what was called a turret car. Which would've had, it would've been railroad iron armored on wheels, and it would've had a turret like the uss Monitor with a gun that could point in any direction. If you start thinking about that, what is an armored turret mounted gun on wheels? It's one of the prototypes of the tank. So we were actually experimenting with that thing during the Civil War. And the last thing, uh, uh, submarines. Now a lot of people don't realize this, but you, you've probably heard of the, the submarine HL Hunley that, uh, was the first ship in, in, uh, uh, military history to sink an enemy vessel in combat that was in Charleston Harbor in February of 1864. Do you know who built the hunley? The, the ownership of the Hunley was made up three, uh, made up of three parties. Two thirds of those were Texans, and particularly people from Port Lavaca at Lavaca at the time. And those guys helped. Bill the Hunley, helped crew the Hunley and they didn't stop there. They were actually building submarines all the way through the end of the Civil War. And we had two torpedo boats, which are kind of submersibles, that were being built in Texas at the end of the war. And we had one honest to goodness submarine, which was a lot like the HL Hunley we have spy reports from Union Spies that they actually had a submarine here, uh, that was being built here. And at the end of the war, when they take over, we, the reports we have are that the union seized this vessel and ended up, uh, basically turning back to its, uh, owners for scrap. But they were experimenting with all these wild technologies and kind of throwing it up against the wall to see what worked. And, you know, what really worked the best, the most shocking thing that worked, that was designed by Texans. Were torpedoes, which we would call mines today, but there were floating mines. And these guys from Lavaca that had been attacked, uh, by Union Gunboats in the, in the, uh, November of 1862, decided they were going to build some mines to help, uh, protect their waters against the union gunboats. And they worked so well that they were take, these guys were sent on to Mobile and to Richmond and to North Carolina and all of these different places, and they built and put mines in all of those waters. And so at the end of the war, for example, when you hear the, the famous invasion of Mobile Bay by, uh, Admiral Farragut, and he, he's going into the bay, somebody says, there, there are torpedoes over there, mines. He says, damn, the torpedoes, full speed ahead. And of course, one of his vessels does that, and it's blown up and sunk. When he says, damn the torpedoes, he's damning the Texas torpedoes because all those torpedoes were made by Texans and installed by Texans. And the arrangements we have, the arrangements under which they were made and put into the waters, and they got a specified percentage of any of the, the union ships, uh, that were sunk. So it's a, a fascinating, kind of an untold story of the Civil War and, and, uh, it, it's something that is kind of homegrown here and something I don't think anybody really realizes about.

J.R.: 47:11

That's fascinating. When I drive through Port Lavaca today, the last thing I think of is submarine building. All right. So let's be my last, I guess, official question before we move on to Q&A from the audience. Um, a few years removed from the Civil War, let's, uh, could you, could you tell us a little bit about, uh, reconstruction and then in 1880, the celebrity that shows up here in Galveston?

Ed Cotham: 47:36

So after the Civil War's over, of course, uh, we end up. Uh, electing uh, US Grant, uh, president for two successive terms. And, and that's an amazing thing if you think about it, because at the outset of the Civil War grant was a sort of a disappointed and depressed store clerk in Galena, Illinois in a store he didn't even own. And within 10 years, he is general in chief of the United States Army and is president of the United States. Now, there's no other country in the world where that kind of, uh, uh, rise could possibly happen. But again, things go very badly wrong after the, the end of the Civil War because again, what we talked about earlier, there's no, there's no negotiated transition between the end of the confederacy and the advent of, of, you know, the union government as it is restored there. There's nothing is negotiated, nothing is, is put in place to really assist with this process. And in the absence of structure, chaos develops. And into that chaos steps of very un wholesome elements, including people like the Ku Klux Klan, which grant will have to fight, uh, during the entirety of his two terms in office. But at the end of, uh, grant's terms, uh, they'll have this election in 1876. It's a complete disaster. And, you know, if we think our last election was contested, that was heavily contested on a number of different fronts, and it ends up being resolved in, in a kind of what they call a corrupt bargain, which is that they'll, they'll let one of the, uh, candidates take the presidency, but in return for that, uh, all the troops will be, all the union troops will be removed from the south. And when that happens, then the elements take over in Texas and in the other places in the South, and you get the Jim Crow laws and you get some really, really horrible things that happen as a result of that. Now Grant is not president. When that happens, he's gone. And, and the reason is he is sick of things up there. And after the, after his presidency, he decides to take a trip around the world and he literally goes around the world. He goes to Japan, he goes to Egypt. And what's interesting about that is he, he has a newspaper reporter around along with him who starts sending back accounts of grant's, visits to all these different, uh, kings and queens and potentates all around the world. And people read about Grant and the way he's received and suddenly they start liking Grant more. And it's just, he gets good publicity and it just keep coming back a steady stream of it. So when Grant comes back at the end of this journey in, in 1878 and 79, uh, he finds that unexpectedly there's a huge movement afoot for him to be named to a third term as president. And Grant says he doesn't care whether he's or not, he really does not care. He'll, he'll do it if people want it, but he, he's not gonna seek it for himself, but his political advisors want it. And so they say, you know, that traveling thing worked out really well for you. Let's do some more of that. So they send him out on another trip, and this time Grant says, all right, I'm not going very far. I'll go to Cuba and I'll go to Mexico. because he wants to show his wife some places he's been in the Mexican War. And on the way back from Mexico, grant says, you know, I've never been to Galveston, I'll go to Galveston. So they take off from Vera Cruz almost, uh, their ship almost goes down in a horrible storm. But they arrive here, here in Galveston, March of 1880 and Grant arrives as the biggest celebrity that ever hit Texas. And I, I would say he's probably the biggest celebrity who's ever hit Texas up to this point. I mean, we've this guy, it was like, be like the Pope and Elvis Presley showed up on the same day. This, this is big time. Fame, and nobody in Galveston had ever seen him in person. Everybody wanted to see him. People were on the roofs to see him. Huge parade takes him over to the Tremont Hotel. And we have probably the most famous social event in Galveston history in the the Tremont house, uh, ballroom on that one night, he'll spend about a week in Texas and leave. But the interesting thing is Grant comes to Texas in 1880. Now remember, 1865 is the end of the war. Texas is a heavily confederate state. You would have thought that people in Texas, these ex-confederates would hate him. Right? That's what I thought coming into the research. No, they love Grant. Everybody waits in line to shake his hand. He's a big celebrity. Everybody loves him. Partly because, again, the way he treated Robert E. Lee at the end of the war. Uh, he could have made things really difficult for Lee and his army in terms of the surrendered, but he had been generous in the terms he offered. And even after the war when, when, uh, forces up North wanted to indict Lee for treason and, and basically put him and the other people in prison, grant stood up and said, I will not stand for this. I gave this man my word that he would be not molested in terms of the surrender and stood up for him. So people in the South had a, a, generally a very favorable impression of Grant. And, uh, his visit here was, was, again, probably the leading thing that ever happened in the, in the 19th century in Galveston.

J.R.: 52:58

All right. So we have just a few minutes left, about eight minutes left. I'm gonna open it up to Q and A from anyone here. Does anyone have any questions?

Ruth: 53:09

I have one. This is about Galveston. During that blockade because my family was here. My great-aunt was born in 1861. So that meant she was just an infant. And my grandfather was three or four. So I just wondered, what, what would the effect on people that were here?

Ed Cotham: 53:24

Well, to begin with, there weren't very many people here because very early in the war, once they figured out that, uh, the, the union ships could bombard the city at any time, and they did have one of those bombardments in 1861, uh, most of the, the residents left except the ones that were real, uh, union supporters, most of them left. So, for example, the, uh, the Galveston newspaper was printed in Houston for the entire remainder of the war, even though it said the Galveston news, it's printed in Houston, and there are very few people here in 1862 until, until Galveston is recapture. And so when Galveston is recaptured, you know, there's this question about, well, is this gonna last or not? And they manage to kind of, Uh, you know, last long enough to build the fortifications around the city, then you do start to get some people coming back into the city. But it's not like it was before the war, or like, it's gonna be at the end of the war, not that kind of population. And the people that do come back, uh, have a very difficult time because you can't, you don't have, uh, you know, the shops are not really open to service anything. You can't do the kind of things you would've normally done. You know, galveston's big thing was, was shipping and, and working on, on ships, things to do with, with vessels, transactions. You can't do any of that. So it doesn't really work out very well for these people. And the crime is terrible. At one point in 1864, uh, the Confederate Signal Corps officer comes down from the, uh, building where the Mod Coffee House is today, and he just walks out the door and he's, he's robbed, uh, by a guy with a gun and he's shot in the leg. And they take off with, uh,$200 of money. And, uh, uh, Lindsay, who's the lieutenant Lindsay, who's the name of the signal corps guy, says that the only thing that that made him feel better about that loss was that the money was completely worthless about a year later. Oh my.

J.R.: 55:21

Anything else?

Ethan: 55:22

Have you heard accounts of people finding cannonballs in their houses or in their yards? Is there truth that there would be cannonballs from the battle that they were found afterwards? and if so, was it a danger?

Ed Cotham: 55:32

Yes. There, there, there have been iron found all over the island from the, not only the battle of Galveston, but there were several bombardments, both from the Gulf and from inside the harbor that would've left a large quantity of iron there. And, and we have, we have some examples here in the museum. I mean, the museum on the third floor, for example, of some iron that hit the Hendley building. But there's, there's a, a, a structure. I know that there's a house called the, the, uh, Grover house over on, on Market Street that still stands there today. And I remember reading the account of a guy who was, was a child in that house in, in the 18, late 18 hundreds. And he said whenever they needed fishing weights, they would just go over to the back of that house and you could find iron sitting all over the place there. But there, there are some actual examples of people finding shells on, uh, Galveston and digging'em up. And we have one account where, where a young boy was actually trying to open one of them up and see what it was in it, and it exploded, killed him. So, uh, that kind of put a kibosh on that, but, You know, again, we, we, we did the excavation on a war ship called the Westfield, which was found in Galveston Bay and, and excavated that. But when we did that, we found huge quantities of, uh, civil War ordinance that had to be, uh, basically the, you know, the Marine Corps to come in and, and drill and, and safely remove the powder from that to make it safe.

J.R.: 56:57

Um,

Henry: 56:58

What consequences did Houston's anti secessionist states have on him politically and personally?

Ed Cotham: 57:03

Well, that, and that's an interesting subject because if you go to, uh, it's I think the corner of 22nd and post office, that's where the old, uh, Tremont Hotel used to be. I guess it's 23rd and post office, that's the old Tremont Hotel. It's also a parking lot today. That was the first one, and. Houston came in 1861 and was determined to give a speech to the people of Galveston about why he did not support secessiom and had his position on it. And this was put in the paper that he was gonna come and speak at the Tremont. And his friends all told him, don't do that. That is a very bad idea. You know, people were, will kill you. And, and Houston said, I'm gonna do it. And rode over here at that time, because there wasn't, wasn't actually a, a road over here. Got over here, went over to the, the, uh, balcony of the Tremont Hotel and was getting ready to go up at, and as he's getting ready to go up into the balcony, so a voice in the crowd says, let's get a rope and hang the old traitor, which, you know, wouldn't encourage me to speak very well. I don't know about you, but Houston went up there and delivered about a 30 minute speech, which is transcribed and we have copies of, it's a, it's a beautiful speech. And what he said was this, He said, uh, you may win Southern May, independence for the South, but I doubt it. And he said, you, when you look at all the resources that are aligned against you, you don't have the resources to compete with these people. But he said, you've made your decision. I stand with Texas and I'm going to to support the state. And of course, his son, uh, would actually serve in the Confederate army. And, uh, although Houston was again, had opposed a session, uh, when he had been offered the opportunity by Abraham Lincoln to get the support of federal troops to try and stay in office, Houston had turned that down. And so I think that probably diminished his reputation shortly there, uh, among Texans. But in the long term, I don't know that it had any, any perceptible, uh, effect on his reputation.

J.R.: 59:06

Everyone, thank you so much for joining us this evening for Galveston Unscripted at the Rosenberg Library. This episode comes from the Rosenberg Library Conversation series where I sat down with a few historians to talk about some extremely interesting historical facts about Galveston and Texas history. I would like to personally thank the Rosenberg Library for allowing Galveston Unscripted to hold live podcast conversations in the library.

J.R. (2): 59:33

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J.R.: 1:00:07

When I drive through Port Lavaca today, the last thing I think of is submarine building.