The town was also the headquarters of the U.S. Army’s Department
of Texas. In command was
Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee of the
First Cavalry. One of the most respected and accomplished officers
in the entire army, Lee was fresh off his capture of
John Brown’s
gang at Harpers Ferry when he was assigned to this new command
in February 1860. Lee and Charles Anderson were intimate friends.
Robert Anderson and Colonel Lee were the great favorites of General
Winfield Scott, for whom they served with distinction in the Mexican
War. Lee made frequent trips to the Anderson residence north of San
Antonio to attend dances and hunting parties. Officers in the San
Antonio garrison lived in private residences and had ample time for
leisure pursuits. Most socialized with the large circle of Union men
and their families, and there were balls and parties almost every
evening.
Anderson’s handsome daughter Kitty danced with Lee
and other officers, but her heart was stolen by twenty-four-year-old
Lieutenant William Graham Jones. After a brief courtship, the two
were engaged.
3
Two opposing forces, one a formal army and the other a nascent
rebel militia, watched and plotted as developments on the national
scene evolved. The KGC plot was already in motion. Unbeknownst to
Lee or Anderson,
Major General David E. Twiggs had already played
his first card the day after Lincoln’s election. Georgia native Twiggs
was on leave from his former command of the Department of Texas
and convalescing in New Orleans when he heard the electoral news.
Despite his poor health, Twiggs wrote immediately for orders and
was directed to resume command in San Antonio. He arrived back in
Texas on November 27, just three days after the Alamo meeting. The
man behind this move was Secretary of War John B. Floyd.
Floyd and Charles Anderson had been friends since childhood,
although they had become distant in recent years as Floyd moved
in lockstep with the
Breckenridge set. For months the secretary had
been moving federal arms and munitions into the hands of various
Southern governors, so that local militias could train and prepare for
secession and possible war. Until his resignation from Buchanan’s
cabinet in December 1860, Floyd’s actions had made him one of the most
infamous traitors of the times. But he made at least one strategic
mistake. Knowing that Charles’s brother Robert was a Southerner, and
assuming him in sympathy with secession, Floyd had General
Scott
assign Robert Anderson to Fort Moultrie at the mouth of Charleston
harbor. That decision would later come back to haunt Floyd.
Lieutenant Colonel Lee was startled and perplexed by these sudden
developments. Twiggs was clearly infirm. Why would Floyd relieve
Lee of an important command at this critical juncture? What did his
dear friend and mentor General Scott know about this? He did not
wait long for answers, for Scott had been plotting as well. Near the
end of October, Scott produced a paper intended for private
circulation. His monograph outlined potential military strategies for the
United States to consider should the Southern states secede. In
retrospect, the idea was brilliant and simple. The Union would make the
western theater the primary focus of early war efforts. Scott planned
to immediately occupy the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers,
thus severing Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and western Louisiana
from the rest of the Confederacy. Once that was accomplished, the
Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers would be secured in a similar way.
On December 1, Scott sent these views to Anderson in San Antonio,
asking that he share them with both Twiggs and Lee. Anderson gave
the papers to Twiggs first, who returned them after a week. Twiggs
told Anderson that it was “damned strange that General Scott should
have sent the papers to you.” He then added, “I know General Scott
fully believes that God had to spit on his hands to make Bob Lee
and Bob Anderson, and you are Major Anderson’s brother.” Charles
Anderson then took the package from Twiggs and delivered it
immediately to Lee. A few days after Lee received General Scott’s papers,
he summoned Anderson to his room at the boardinghouse. Charles
brought along friend and confidante Dr. Willis G. Edwards. Lee felt
that the publication of the papers might imply that the federal
government intended to take preemptive military action, and he made
Anderson promise not to publish them. The men talked at length
about the secession crisis.
Anderson was violent in his denunciation of the Southern
fire-eaters, whom he felt deserved most of the blame for the perilous state
of affairs. Lee replied that “somebody is surely at fault, probably
both factions.” When Anderson restated his opinion and suggested
that a broad-based conspiracy was brewing, Lee remained silent. At
this point, Edwards pointedly asked whether in such cases a man’s
loyalty was due to his home state or to his nation. Lee’s decision
would change the course of history. Lee did not equivocate. Surely
this vexing issue had tortured him for some weeks or even months.
He chose this moment to declare his intentions to two of his close
friends. Lee believed that his first allegiance was due to Virginia. The
conversation ended. Lee made preparations to leave for Fort Mason,
about 112 miles from San Antonio, and await a fate now held firmly
by the very politicians he so loathed. He had scarcely left town when
South Carolina voted to secede.
Some politicians were working feverishly behind the scenes to
prevent the secession crisis from spreading. In Congress,
Senator John
J. Crittenden of Kentucky introduced a compromise bill he had
conceived with the help of Larz Anderson and others, but it failed at
the eleventh hour. The day after Christmas, Robert Anderson, seeing
that his position was too exposed to safeguard his men, transported
them from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston
harbor. This move was viewed by some Southerners as an act of
aggression. On January 9, the steamer
Star of the West
was attacked by
South Carolinians determined to prevent reinforcements from
entering the fort. The whole world waited to see what would happen next.
As the nation was coming apart, Union men from all over Texas
scrambled to slow the secession momentum. In mid-January, Charles
Anderson received a letter from
Judge I. A. Paschall requesting an
immediate meeting with
Governor Sam Houston in Austin. Upon his
arrival,
Anderson learned that the governor had big plans for him.
Houston desired that Anderson take control of all the forts, arsenals,
arms and munitions, and other property of the United States within
the state of Texas. By preempting the Knights of the Golden Circle,
Houston hoped he could scotch the rebellion before it began.
4
Houston’s request to
General Twiggs to cede arms to the state was
met with evasion. On January 22, Twiggs replied that because he was
without instructions from Washington, D.C., he could not fulfill the
governor’s request. After secession, Twiggs continued, if the governor
repeated his demands, he would then receive an answer. Houston
did not know that Twiggs had already requested to be relieved of his
command nine days earlier. As Houston and Twiggs tried to outfox
each another, the flames of disunion grew into a full-fledged
conflagration. Four states had seceded by the time a despondent Anderson
returned to Worth Springs. He immediately wrote
William M. Corry
asking for advice. “Our form of government is a failure,” Anderson
lamented. “The dream is mere mirage. Our system . . . like all other
perfect theories, fails in the experience through the amazing
irrationality and malevolence of Mankind.” Though he still accused the
secessionists of igniting the revolution, the abolitionists certainly bore
blame as well. “If the people of the North had possessed the requisite
capacity for self-government,” Anderson argued, “they never would
have allowed their
personal
sympathies, envy and other private
passions to thrust themselves into a ballot box designed for different
motives.”
5
While Anderson brooded, Larz managed to visit their brother
Robert at Fort Sumter. He returned to Washington carrying secret
messages. Larz had many influential friends in the capital and worked
tirelessly to achieve some sort of last-ditch compromise. Meanwhile,
Robert E. Lee remained at Fort Mason, awaiting the action of the
other Southern states. Texas did not keep him waiting long.
6
Sam
Houston, despite doing all he could to forestall a secession
convention, was losing the battle. Ultimately he was forced to yield to a
petition of sixty-one prominent citizens from all over the state. Nearly all
were KGC members. The secession convention was held on January
28. Houston again ordered Anderson to Austin, and the Texas Union
leaders awaited the results of the convention. The vote was 166 to 7
in favor of secession, to be ratified by popular vote on February 23.
“The deed is done,” Anderson wrote to his former law partner Rufus
King on February 9. “Texas goes out of the Union to which she never
ought to have belonged.”
7
The
KGC did not wait for ratification. On January 29, they
established a Committee of Safety to begin taking “control of the arms
and munitions of war within her limits.” They feared “coercion”
from the twenty-eight hundred U.S. troops within the state’s borders.
The committee boldly stated that it expected that
General Twiggs,
“a Southern man by birth and friendly to the cause of the South,”
would surrender U.S. Army property. In case he refused, the
committee commissioned former U.S. marshal
Henry Eustace McCulloch to
persuade him otherwise.
It was all a ruse, as Twiggs was in on the plot all along. McCulloch
and his band of nearly a thousand armed citizens confronted 160
federal troops. Twiggs was permitted to feign surrender to an
over-whelming force of arms on February 16. As it so happened, Lee was
returning to San Antonio that very day. When his ambulance
arrived at his boardinghouse in the middle of the afternoon, it was
surrounded by men wearing a curious red badge that Lee had never
seen before. “Who are these men?” Lee asked Mrs. Caroline Darrow.
“They are McCulloch’s,” she replied. “General Twiggs surrendered
everything to the state this morning and we are all prisoners of war.”
Lee was visibly upset; some later claimed they saw tears in his eyes
as he spoke. “Has it come as soon as this?” he asked. Unsure of his
status, Lee walked to a nearby hotel, registered, and changed into
civilian garb. He then proceeded to army headquarters, now
occupied by McCulloch’s men. The commissioners told Lee that unless
he resigned immediately and joined the rebellion, he would not be
allowed to transport his personal effects out of the state. Remorse
turned quickly to anger as Lee steadfastly refused to recognize this
apparent coup and asserted that he had no obligations to an illegal
gang of revolutionaries. He then sought out Charles Anderson and
asked him to look after his belongings until they could be sent east.
Together they walked to the commission merchant.
While on their way to the warehouse, Lee asked Anderson if he
remembered their conversation of a few weeks previous. Anderson
said that he did indeed. Lee reiterated his decision. “I still think,”
Lee insisted, “as I told you and Doctor Edwards that my loyalty to
Virginia ought to take precedence over that which is due the federal
government. I shall so report myself at Washington. If she stands by
the old Union, so will I. But if she secedes, though I do not believe in
secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause
for revolution, then I will still follow my native state with my sword,
and if need be with my life.” Anderson felt compelled to respond.
“The selection of the place in which we were born,” he explained,
“was not an act of our own volition; but when we took the oath of
allegiance to our government, it was an act of manhood, and that
oath we cannot break.”
“I know you think and feel very differently,” Lee replied, “but I
can’t help it. These are my principles, and I must follow them.” Lee
left the following day. On his arrival in Washington City, Winfield
Scott made Lee an enticing offer. Scott proposed that he be promoted
immediately to the rank of colonel. The president had further
authorized Scott to offer Lee command of the entire army, second to only
the aged Scott himself. Lee repeated what he had told Anderson and
left for his plantation at Arlington, Virginia.
8
Anderson wondered what the future held for him and his family. A
week later, he received a disturbing telegram. His son
Latham, an
1859 graduate of West Point and first lieutenant in the U.S. Fifth
Infantry, had lost his first battle to a large force of Texas Rangers in
New Mexico. He had escaped unharmed. Would Anderson and his
family be so lucky? Nerves were fraying inside the Anderson
household. Anderson wrote that his terrified wife “now fancies K.G.C.s,
Vigilance Committees, or Committees of Safety in every road or
street.” With Texas voters formally endorsing a secession that had
already taken place, Anderson saw all but the most hard-core Unionists
jump on the bandwagon or at least cooperate to save their fortunes
and their skins. He himself would have none of it.
“In two years more,” Anderson wrote King, “my income from
horses would probably have begun at between $5 and 7,000 per
annum.” But rather than be “an alien and an enemy to [his] native
land,” he vowed to “choose instant poverty.” Anderson decided to
leave as soon as the Committee of Safety would allow it. He sold
Kentucky lands in Madison and Franklin Counties to help finance
the move. “I might be off before a month—though it may not be in
6,” he predicted. He suspected that leaving would not be so easy.
While many hoped for peaceable secession, Anderson did not
“expect to see that miracle of miracles,” he wrote King on March 24.
Two separate republics with a twenty-five-hundred-mile border,
separated with such bitterness and animosity and goaded by fanatics on
both sides could hardly coexist peacefully. “I am compelled to droop
my head and close my eyes against the rising pandemonium of the
near future,” Anderson admitted.
9