In March, 1861 Texans decided that the time for compromise with the free states of the North had passed. The time to stand solidly and vigorously with the Deep South had arrived even if it meant a costly war. Southern interests had to be defended at whatever costs!
While pockets of Unionism existed in north central Texas and in the German Hill Country to the west of Austin, the vote of the state's electorate on the secession proposal was a foregone conclusion. Texas was an extension of the Deep South socially, economically, and politically. While few in number, plantation owners wielded disproportionate influence on public opinion and governmental decisions. Economically, slavery was much too important to take chances with once the new Republican party assumed control of the executive branch of the federal government. The 182,000 black slaves in Texas in 1861 had an assessed value of almost $107 million - "20 percent more than the assessed value of all cultivated lands". Texans, like other Southerners, were Jacksonian Democrats who rejected the kind of larger, interventionary federal government envisioned by the Republican platform and campaign in 1860.
Most importantly, Texans had linked themselves psychologically to the Deep South during the sectional struggles of the 1840s and 1850s. With each passing battle - annexation, the Wilmot Proviso, the Santa Fe controversy, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court - Texans came to regard the northern free states as their mortal enemies. Northerners had spawned abolitionism; Northerners had spawned John Brown (who had attempted to spark a slave rebellion across the South); Northerners had given birth to the Republican party committed to the strangulation of slavery; and Northerners had placed Abraham Lincoln in the White House without a single vote in Dixie. Northerners were preparing now to wipe out the entire southern way of life. If slavery were limited geographically to those areas where it already existed but was barred from expanding to the west, the institution would collapse under its own weight and the southern system would disintegrate, accompanied by economic ruin, social upheaval, and political anarchy. The South, then, had to act to defend itself by withdrawing from the Union, establishing its own separate country, and taking up arms in defense if the North was determined to fight.
Immediately following the state's withdrawal from the Union, militia forces led by members of the Texas Ranger such as "Rip" Ford and Henry McCulloch began seizing federal military installations. Convinced of their indefensibility, federal officers abandoned the western frontier forts in Texas as well as Fort Brown along the Rio Grande in Brownsville. General D. E. Twiggs, faced with a far superior number of Texas militia and seeing that an engagement would be futile, surrendered the federal arsenal in San Antonio with all its weapons and supplies. Under an agreement worked out on the spot, Twiggs and his troops were permitted to march to the Gulf Coast with their personal sidearms for evacuation to the North. Similar arrangements were negotiated all around the state. Thus "without firing a shot, Texans disposed of a large part of the Federal army and seized $3 million in military stores". The citizens of the state would learn it would be much more difficult and costly to defend Texas.
While nearly two-thirds of the state's military-age population saw service during the next four years, Texas was far from the center of the war. Texas was, after all, a frontier outpost of the Confederacy - the westernmost state and one of the most sparsely populated and least fully developed. This was reflected in the Union's military strategy for winning the conflict which began with the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The "Anaconda Plan" called for splitting off the western sections of the Confederacy by gaining control of the Mississippi River and then constricting the life out of the rebel states with military strikes into the Deep South and an impenetrable naval blockade. Such a strategy, if successfully implemented, would deprive the Confederacy of the means to export cotton, by which it hoped to finance the war effort, and import needed foodstuffs and arms necessary to defend southern soil. It also would deprive Texas food and weapons to the heart of the Confederacy. While the state's coastline was vulnerable given the Union's near monopoly in naval strength, Texans had to defend their western Indian frontier as well. Without assistance now from the United States Army, which had manned the frontier forts since annexation in 1846, Texans found they were no match for the Indians, who rolled back the line of Anglo settlement nearly two hundred miles during the war years.
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