June 21, 2023 • 60 mins
📍Visit our interactive map!
Enjoy this content? Buy me a book! 📚
📱Social and other ways to explore Texas History
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!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Ed Cotham (00:00):
I got interested in some Irishmen that were fighting
there during the Battle ofGalveston on the artillery side.
Blockade running was a big thinghere in Galveston.
I knew that a civil war battle,an important battle, had taken
place here in 1863.
I would say, you're not gonnabelieve this, but this is where
Juneteenth actually originated.
(00:21):
I had a lot of people on mytours that would say, June,
what?
They had never heard of it.
J.R. (00:26):
Welcome to Galveston Unscripted.
This episode comes from theRosenberg Library Conversation
series where I sat down with afew historians to talk about
some extremely interestinghistorical facts about Galveston
and Texas history.
I would like to personally thankthe Rosenberg Library for
allowing Galveston Unscripted tohold live podcast conversations
(00:47):
in the library.
This conversation series wassuch a great experience and I
really look forward to pickingit up again in the fall of 2023.
And a very huge thank you to ourguests.
Now this episode with Mr.
Ed Cotham is about an hour long,but trust me, you are gonna
wanna stick around and listenthrough the entire thing.
(01:08):
We discussed the Civil War inTexas, and the Battle of
Galveston and some otherhistorical aspects of the 1860s
here in Texas.
J.R. (2) (01:17):
Check the link in the description for the direct links
to the books that our guest haswritten.
If this is your first timelistening to Galveston
Unscripted, be sure to subscribeto the podcast.
If you've listened or watchedbefore and you enjoy the content
we are putting out in audio andvideo, please make sure to like,
subscribe and review thepodcast.
(01:38):
Leave us a review, leave us arating.
It really helps other peoplefind what we are doing here at
Galveston Unscripted.
Your rating and review helpsother people find Galveston
Unscripted and discover theamazing history of our little
island.
And be sure to follow us onFacebook, Instagram, TikTok, all
those social media platforms.
J.R. (01:57):
without further ado, let's hop into this episode with Mr.
Ed Cotham.
Hi everybody.
If you guys don't know me, myname is JR.
I started Galveston Unscripted,a podcast about, um, it was July
of 2021 and I started it in mycloset.
Uh, and started building audioguides that paired with my
running tour.
(02:18):
Um, so I started recording theseaudio guides and then started
interviewing people, and it'sjust kind of grown and expanded,
and I am so honored to be ableto sit here at the Rosenberg
library and sit with people likeEd and discuss our city and
Texas, and, um, how the islandthat we live on is just such an
(02:38):
important piece of history inthis, in this state and in this
country.
So, um, thank y'all so much forjoining 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 longbio here, so I'm just gonna hit
the highlights.
All right.
So Ed retired in 2023 as a ChiefInvestment Officer of the Terry
(03:01):
Foundation in Houston.
The Terry Foundation is thelargest private sector or
private source of scholarshipsin at Texas universities.
Ed holds an undergraduate degreein economics from the University
of Houston and a master's degreein economics from the University
of Chicago.
Ed returned to Texas to obtain alaw degree from the University
(03:21):
of Texas.
Ed is the is the, a formerpresident of the Houston Civil
War Roundtable and is active inthe Civil War preservation
Movement.
In 2011, ed received thePresident's award for
distinguished volunteer servicefrom the Galveston Historical
Foundation.
He is a life member of the CivilWar Preservation Trust.
Uh, he has plenty of Civil Warawards and awards from all over
(03:45):
the country.
Um, so I'm just gonna list off afew of his books here.
Uh, his published works includeBattle on the Bay, the Civil War
Struggle for Galveston, which wewill discuss a little bit about
today.
Sabine pass, the Confederacy'sther monopoly, the Southern
journey of a Civil War Marine,the illustrated notebook of
Henry O Gusley.
(04:06):
A busy week in Texas.
Ulysses s Grant's 1880, visit tothe Lone Star State and
Juneteenth the story behind thecelebration.
All right, so am I missinganything, ed?
I don't think so.
Okay, gotcha.
All right.
So Ed, um, he's been on mypodcast before and we discussed
the Battle of Galveston.
Um, and I, I really wanted todive into a little bit of Ed's
(04:29):
background and how he got into,um, how he got into Civil War
history in the first place.
So, ed, could you tell us howyou got into Civil War history
and how you, how you got intoGalveston
Ed Cotham (04:41):
history?
Sure.
JR I'm delighted to be here thethis evening to, to talk with
you about one of my favoritesubjects, which is Civil War
Things connected with Galveston.
I got interested in the CivilWar very early, and I can
remember my mother taking meparticularly to the Vicksburg
Battlefield because we had somefamily over that way.
(05:01):
Uh, early on in life and I gotreally interested in civil war
history in that connection.
But, you know, coming back toTexas, we didn't have much in
the way of civil warbattlefields that you could
visit, at least at that time.
And I, I didn't really keepthat, that, uh, interest as
fresh as I could until I got tocollege.
And then I got hooked on, uh, acouple of books, particularly
(05:23):
Bruce Catton's history of, ofthe Civil War and, and got back
into it.
And then eventually I startedwondering what, what happened in
Texas during the Civil War?
And my wife and I had a weekendplace down here in Galveston.
And so I actually came here tothe Rosenberg library at the
time and I went up to theGalveston, Texas History Center,
(05:45):
which, uh, I, I will say withwithout reservation, as one of
the great archives in the UnitedStates to research anything
connected with history and.
I was up there and I, and I wentup to, to one of the archivists
at the time, and I said, I'dlike to see the book on the
Battle of Galveston, because Iknew that a civil war battle, an
(06:06):
important battle, had takenplace here in January of 1863.
And the archivist at that timesaid, well, hate to tell you,
but there's not really one.
And I said, there's not onethat's, that's hard to imagine.
And I kept waiting, waiting,figuring that somebody out there
had to be writing a book on thisimportant battle.
(06:26):
Well, five years went by andnobody did.
And I finally said, you know,this is interesting enough.
I'm just gonna do this.
And so it took me five years toresearch and write my first
book, which was on the Battle ofGalveston.
The University of Texas Presswas kind enough to actually
publish that book.
And I got hooked on it.
And it's, it's the way thisworks.
(06:47):
And I know there are a number ofauthors here in the room that
will tell you the same thing.
When you're working on a projectlike that, you see something
interesting.
And in the case of the, of theBattle of Galveston, I got
interested in some little, uh,Irishmen that were fighting
there during the Battle ofGalveston on the artillery side.
And I, I knew that they hadsomething to do with the Battle
(07:07):
of Sabine Pass.
So I followed them over andwrote a book on the Battle of
Sabine Pass.
And while I was writing the bookin the Battle of Sabine Pass, I
got interested in the ships thatwere used by the union in that
battle and the, the Battle ofGalveston.
So I followed that out to thesouthern journey of a Civil War
Marine.
And it's kind of snowballedsince then.
And as many of you know, I'vegotten to where I give a lot of
(07:30):
tours of Civil War, Galveston,particularly around the battles
anniversary at the beginning ofJanuary of 1863.
And as I would leave peoplearound this city, it always
struck me that there were somethings that I would point to
that didn't have historicmarkers to do with it, and
nobody had ever really covered.
And in particular, I remembergoing by.
(07:53):
This lot at the corner of 22ndand Strand and I would point to
the parking lot and saysomething incredibly important
happened on this site of thisparking lot.
And I would say, you're notgonna believe this, but this is
where Juneteenth actuallyoriginated.
(08:13):
And people at the time, now I'vebeen doing this for all close to
40 years, and I would give thesetours and back in the early days
I had a lot of people on mytours that would say, June,
what?
They had never heard of it.
And then I would get people thatthey would say, you mean that
thing that happened where theyhave like barbecues and parades
and stuff?
And I would say, yeah, but ithas a whole lot more to do with
it than that.
(08:34):
That's, that's not really thestory at all.
And I kind of kept waiting forsomebody to write a book that
really covered what actuallyhappened in Galveston on June
19th, 1865.
And kinda like my first book,nobody really did.
And so I finally got up thenerve to actually write that
book, and it came out in jr.
(08:56):
You know, this, it, it came outand I, this was absolute dumb
luck, but it came out and thenthree 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 threateningto write a book on Arbor Day
just to kind of cover the restof the holidays.
But, but as you can see, I'vegotten really interested in, in
(09:18):
Galveston and, and Texas historyin the Civil War.
It kind of followed that threadall through my work.
J.R. (09:24):
All right.
That's great.
Um, so I would like to take a, ahigh level view of Texas
entering the Civil War and thedecisions behind Texas entering
the Civil War and hone in onGalveston.
So could you give us a briefoverview of, I guess, the
decision for Texas to enter theCivil War?
Ed Cotham (09:45):
Sure.
Uh, I mean, Texas is the seventhstate to join the Confederacy,
so Texas is by no means thefirst to do that.
South Carolina, of course, comesout, uh, uh, of the gate
swinging, uh, very heavy.
And Texas was kind of, took kindof a measured approach.
And I think in large part, thatwas due to the leadership in
Texas at that time.
And in particular, Sam Houston.
(10:06):
Sam Houston did not at allfavor, uh, secession he, he was
really opposed to that.
Uh, and he fought that as longand as hard as he could.
He delayed having a secessionconvention like everywhere else.
And when it came, he saw to itwith some, some people there
that in instead of Texas justvoting to leave at a convention,
(10:28):
that they put it up to a popularvote and all that kind of
delayed Texas leaving the unionand, and going in favor of the
south.
And there was also a question.
It, it was not just a questionof whether Texas would leave the
union.
There was also the question ofwhat Texas would leave the union
for, because there was, we'dbeen a republic, the Republic of
(10:51):
Texas was still an option, and Ithink maybe Sam Houston in the
back of his mind still had somesort of idea that if Texas left
the union, maybe they would goback into a republic or
something, that they didn't needto join the rest of the cotton
South at that time.
And so that was very delayed andfinally happened.
(11:11):
But we did have this vote.
The interesting thing to meabout the way that we left, uh,
the union was, if you look atthe vote now, it's, it's very
heavily in favor of secession.
Most places, although there aresome counties, particularly
where there are large Germanpopulation or you know,
immigrant populations wheresecession did not, did not pass
(11:34):
a lot.
Galveston was not one of thoseplaces.
Galveston voted heavily in favorof secession and at first you
kind of wonder what were thosepeople thinking?
Because Galveston was thelargest port in Texas growing at
the rate of 50% per year.
It was an insane place to becommercially at the outset
(11:56):
before the war began.
And almost as soon as the warbegan, of course, uh, the Union
blockades Galveston.
And so Galveston ends up beingcommercially hurt worse than any
other place in the state duringthe balance of the Civil War.
So it didn't work out forGalveston very well, at least
(12:17):
during the war.
Uh, but you know, that's sort ofthe, the whole operation
throughout the war iseverybody'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 enthusiasticwhen they do.
And if you look at the number oftroops that Texas provided as a
percentage of the adult whitepopulation, it's very, very high
(12:41):
and compares with anywhere elsein the Confederacy.
J.R. (12:46):
So you mentioned that, uh, Galveston was economically, uh,
hurt by entering the, enteringthe Civil War.
And, um, so I know Galveston wasblockade by the Union and
Galveston, and one question Iget very often is about the
Blockade runners, uh, hereleaving Galveston and running
that cotton out of the port ofGalveston.
(13:08):
Could you tell us a little bitabout Blockade Runners, and do
you, if you know any of thetactics that they used?
Ed Cotham (13:15):
Sure.
Blockade running was a big thinghere in Galveston.
And, and think about it thisway, at the end of the Civil
War, Galveston was the lastmajor Confederate port anywhere.
Anywhere in the Confederatestates.
And so as the war went on andthe union blockade became more
and more effective elsewhere inthe Confederacy, in places like
(13:36):
New Orleans are captured, andeventually mobile is captured,
and Savannah is captured inplaces like that, the number of
available ports for theconfederacy to get things out.
And in particular cotton, to getcotton out to some of these
places and trade that for highluxury goods or, or weapons, it
(13:57):
becomes increasingly restricted.
And so blockade running at theoutset of the war in Galveston
was easy, frankly.
Uh, there, they didn't have manyships that were dedicated down
here.
The ships that were dedicated tothe Galveston blockade.
Uh, were relatively old andeffective, and almost anybody
could block run the blockade.
(14:19):
At the beginning of the war, asthe blockade intensified and
became more concentrated off theentrance to Galveston Bay, the
Galveston blockade runners hadto get more sophisticated as
well.
And so we started having anumber of ships that were
purpose built to run theblockade in, in the in, usually
they were built in England orsomewhere abroad, and these
(14:40):
things were steamers, but theywere very low in the water, long
kind of cigar shaped things withvery little relief above the
water.
And they were painted gray sothey wouldn't stand out to the
union blockade ships.
They would pile those ships ashigh as they could with cotton.
And in Galveston, the way theydid it was they went to the top
of a building, a high building,and the building almost
(15:03):
universally chosen, was one thatstill stands today, the Henley
building.
At the corner of 20th and Strandand the blockade runner captains
would wait until there was aparticularly advantageous night.
Usually when it was hazy, maybestormy, that sort of thing.
Maybe foggy as we get from timeto time, they'd wait for those
nights and then just before itgot dark, they'd run to the roof
(15:26):
of the Henley building andthey'd sketch where all these
union blockading ships were ona, on a map and they'd figure
out, it's like football you'rerunning where there's no
defense.
Right?
And so they would run down justas it was getting dark, jump
onto their ship.
They'd already have the steamready and they'd paddle out and
run outta Galveston Harbor andrunning outta Galveston Harbor
(15:47):
with that kind of preparationwas enormously successful.
I think at least 90% of theships running out of of
Galveston were successful,probably for almost the entire
course.
The war, we have a number ofblockade, runner wrecks around
Galveston, but most of those arenot people going out.
There are people coming inbecause again, if you're coming
(16:10):
into Galveston, you had a wholedifferent approach.
You couldn't go to the top ofthe Henley building and figure
out where everybody was.
What you had to do was probablywait until it was just about
dawn, and then find a placewhere you could kind of squeeze
in closer to the coast for theunion blockades and sneak into
one of the channels.
And a lot of these blockaderunner captains didn't have a
(16:32):
whole lot of familiarity withGalveston waters, and they're
really treacherous to beginwith.
So kind of squeezing into someof those channels coming in, uh,
closer to the shore meant thatsome of these ran aground, and
particularly like one, like theDenbigh ran a, ran a ground not
too far from where the jetty istoday.
And that was a tricky operation,and that's where the, the
(16:53):
blockade, uh, kind of failedsometimes and resulted in these
wrecks.
But keep in mind, this wasenormously profitable if you
could run out of the blockade inGalveston.
Probably going out one way andcoming back with a cargo, you
would probably pay for yourentire ship on that one voyage.
(17:13):
And it was enormously profitableto do this.
So that's why it, as, as the warwent on, more and more blockade
runners were coming intoGalveston.
And by 1864, frankly, uh, theaccounts of the newspapers say
that anything that could floatthen was basically being used,
uh, to paddle out to sea andtake cotton as far as they could
(17:35):
get it, and, and, and take it toa place where they, where they
could sell it.
Now, some of the traffic wouldoverland into Mexico, but a lot
of it came outta Galveston onthese blockade runners and not
just Galveston.
It was also the case of SabinePass, uh, Matagorda Bay in a
number of other places.
But Galveston was the center ofblockade running here.
J.R. (17:56):
Okay, so let's get into it.
Uh, October of 1862, uh, theUnion Navy sales into Galveston.
Without a fight.
And they're, you know, they'redocked on, uh, along Galveston
from October to December 31st,1862.
Um, what goes on, I'll, I'm justgonna let you go with that one.
(18:16):
Let's, let's, can we hop rightinto the Battle of Galveston and
the events leading up to,
Ed Cotham (18:23):
so as you say, uh, Galveston was basically
surrendered to the union inOctober of 1862 without a fight.
They fired one gun and thenretreat to the mainland because
the general in charge of Texasat the time was a, a guy named
Paul Octave Hébert who was aformer governor, Louisiana West
Pointer.
He looked at a map and said, youknow, there's no way to defend
(18:44):
an island that's just silly.
Uh, if we're gonna defend thisplace, we just need to defend it
on the mainland.
And ultimately he built a bigfort over there, kind of where
the causeway reaches themainland today.
And that was called Fort Hébertin his honor.
But the, in, in the fall of1862, the Confederate leadership
(19:05):
in Richmond, uh, response to thepeople of Texas who are just
infuriated by this decision toabandon in Galveston Island.
And they send down here a veryunique individual, uh, general
John Bankhead Magruder.
Notice Prince John in the oldarmy.
And, uh, Magruder was the,probably the most unconventional
general of the entire Civil War.
(19:27):
And he gets down here anddecides that not only is he
going to try to recapture thecity of Galveston, but he's
gonna do it almost immediately.
So he gets to Houston inNovember of 1862, and he
launches one of the wildestbattle plans of the entire Civil
War on New Year's Eve between.
December, uh, 31st of 1862,January 1st, 1863.
(19:51):
And it's gonna have all kinds ofwild elements.
He's gonna have, uh, he's gonnasneak, uh, guns over to the, to
from mainland over the railroadbridge, take them to the
waterfront and fire them out atthe ships in the harbor, that
he's gonna have a waiting chargeagainst some of the union troops
that are on a wharf.
And then he's gonna have someimprovised gunboats that he's
(20:12):
made out of, of cottonsteamboats coming from Houston.
Then he loads up with big balesof cotton and all this is gonna
happen in the middle of thenight, and almost all of it goes
dead wrong.
I mean, you could not imagine aplan going absolutely worse, but
in the end he is gets absolutelydumb lucky.
(20:35):
And the union does some thingsthat are even stupider.
And so at the end of theevening, Uh, the, the federal
warship that's in charge ofGalveston, that, that, that's
under the command of, of, uh,Commodore William b Renshaw,
managed to run itself a groundout there on, on Pelican spit in
the middle of, of, uh, GalvestonHarbor.
(20:55):
And they decide they have toblow it up to keep it outta
Confederate hands.
They set the explosives and blowit up, but it blows up too soon
and kills Commodore Red Shaw inhis entire, uh, crew on that,
that boat.
And so what's left of the Unionfleet kind of limps out of
Galveston Harbor and the wildestbattle plan in the Civil War
(21:18):
that went wrong, almost from thebeginning ends up succeeding.
And so Galveston becomes theonly major port city that the
union ever captured.
And then the Confederatesrecaptured from the union.
It's, it becomes one of the, uh,shining success stories of the
Confederacy, and then theydecide they're going.
(21:40):
Put, uh, defenses around theisland and, and put
fortifications around theisland.
And Galveston will last all theway until June of 1865.
And Galveston will become thelast major port, and Texas will
end up being the mostsuccessfully defended
Confederate states.
And it's, it's really aremarkable achievement given how
(22:01):
little the Confederacy had towork with here.
So one thing that I
J.R. (22:07):
know interest, uh, a lot of my listeners and, and people
I talk to pretty often are thecotton clads.
And when I explained to themabout how they stacked
compressed cotton around thesecotton clads and how that was
maybe not enough armor, but itwas armor, nonetheless, um,
they're shocked that that waseven done or even used.
Um, could you tell us a littlebit about the cotton clads, the
(22:29):
process, the thinking and therecruiting for the cotton clads?
Ed Cotham (22:34):
Sure.
Well, keep in mind, I, Imentioned General Magruder.
General Magruder was in chargeof the Confederate army on the
peninsula leading up to Richmondin 1862.
So he is there when the ironcladmonitor in the ironclad Virginia
fight there at Hampton Roads.
And he watches that whole thingwith these iron clads.
(22:55):
Now he's gonna come down toTexas and, you know, he'd like
to build some iron cladshimself, but we don't have
enough iron around here toreally do that.
And he doesn't have the, theoperation to do that.
So he looks around and says,what do we have a lot of?
And it turns out that they havea whole bunch of cotton sitting
here that can't get out andwaiting for, uh, you know, an
exit strategy on blockaderunners, et cetera.
(23:17):
And so he says, maybe we can usethis cotton as the armament for
our ships.
And so they'll take two bigriver steamers, the Bayou City
and the Neptune number two.
And they will put these cottonbales all along the upper
structures of these vessels toprovide some armament.
And in particular for the menthat are behind that armament,
(23:41):
because Magruder expects thatcoming down in the middle of the
night to attack the union fleet.
He's, he's not probably gonna beable to disable those ships with
the, few cannon that are onthese ships.
He's gonna actually have to runthem, run into them and send
over boarding parties.
So he finds some men up kind ofnear College Station, frankly,
(24:03):
and they're part of the SibleyBrigade.
And he, these, these men aredismounted, cavalry, uh, troops.
And he asks if they willparticipate and become part of
the, the boarding parties onthese two Confederate cotton
clad ships.
And they say they will.
And so, uh, general Tom Greens,uh, agrees to have them do this,
(24:24):
and so they will become known inGalveston lore as the horse
Marines.
Because they were cavalrymenthat were serving as Marines on
board these, these cotton cladships.
The interesting part about thatis when you trace down where
these men came from, a lot ofthem were German, uh, troops
that spoke very little Englishup from the hill country.
(24:46):
And if you look at it, the, thelook at the accounts, these men,
when they volunteered to serveonboard these cotton clads, many
of these men had never been on aship before.
And the accounts say that someof these men had never even seen
a ship before.
So they had a very interestingservice as Marines in the middle
of the night onboard these,these cotton clads.
(25:08):
I might also mention what we'retalking about cotton armor.
One of the really unique thingsabout the battle of Galveston is
the use of cotton artillerybecause General Magruder was not
only interested in using cottonon board these steam ships, he
also had brought down a verylarge naval gun, a Dahlgren.
On a railroad car.
(25:28):
And they brought that over to,uh, the city of Galveston, kind
of near where the railroadmuseum is today.
And they brought that over andit was armored with cotton
bales.
And he had done the same thingin Virginia at a battle called
Savage's Station.
Uh, but he'd used iron on thatoccasion with railroad iron.
And they called that thatrailroad car with the iron, the
(25:52):
land Merry back because it was,uh, kind of an iron clad thing.
But he did that again inGalveston Arbor with, with
cotton.
What's interesting about that isthat that is the in Virginia was
the very first rail mountedartillery that had ever been
used in battle.
And the battle Galveston is onlythe second time in history that,
that, uh, that that, uh,configuration was used.
(26:16):
And as I'm sure we'll talk aboutlater, that's, that's sort of
the precursor to some othertechnology that, uh, Magruder
and his people wereexperimenting with here down in
Texas.
J.R. (26:28):
All right.
So I definitely want to cover,you know, towards the end of
this, I want to cover Juneteenthand, and some of the other
things you're working on.
So, to kind of tie up the Battleof Galveston, one story that you
told me that's very, verymoving, um, is the Edward and
Albert Lea story.
Could you tell us that story andkind of, you know, bring in all
(26:48):
the details and paint us apicture of what that would've
been like?
Ed Cotham (26:54):
So you always hear the stories about the Civil War
that, you know, father foughtagainst son or brother, fought
against brother and everything,but usually you don't actually
hear cases of where thatactually happened.
But we have a documented case ofthat here in Galveston.
And what happened was this, whenGeneral Magruder was getting
ready to launch his battle planhere at Texas, there were a
(27:14):
number of officers down in thearea that volunteered to serve
on his staff.
And one of the officers whovolunteered to serve was a man
named Albert Lea, l e a.
And Albert Lea had been at WestPoint with Magruder.
Magruder knew him very well.
He was a very experienced man.
And so during the battle ofGalveston, Albert Lee was kind
(27:34):
of his eyes and ears, and inparticular, he went to the top
of one of the tall buildingsnear Magruder s headquarters.
Magruder's headquarters werewhere the Sealy mansion is today
at basically at 25th andBroadway, about a block from
here and the tall building thatLee went up on to spy.
What was happening during thebattle was almost certainly the
(27:55):
building that we call AshtonVilla today.
But Lee is watching the battledevelop, and at the end of the
battle, one of the pivotalmoments is when these, these
confederate cotton plaids ramand seize control of a union
ship called the Harriet Lane,which was probably the best ship
in Galveston Harbor on that day.
(28:16):
Now unbeknownst, uh, to AlbertLea.
The first officer on board theunion ship, uh, Harriet Lane was
his son, Edward Lee, and theyhad not spoken since before the
war because they were prettywell estranged by, as you can
imagine, by the, the, theoncoming of the war.
But this was a battle in whichfather literally fought against
(28:40):
son Confederates versus theunion.
At the conclusion of the battle,Albert hurries over to the
waterfront because he knows hisson was on probably one of these
ships.
He's rode out to the, theHarriet Lane, goes on board it
and finds his son mortallywounded on the deck of that
vessel.
He runs over the two are brieflyreunited and uh, Albert goes
(29:03):
away trying to find some medicalattention to, to try and help
his his boy and he leaves.
And as he's gone, the, thesurgeons, which is both the
confederate and the unionsurgeon by this point, go keep
going over to the young officerand saying, uh, uh, Edward Lee,
is there anything we can do?
Is there anything we can do tohelp you?
(29:24):
And Edward keeps asserting overand over again, no, my father is
here.
My father is here.
He will die, uh, in that, inthat battle.
And the next day, um, aremarkable thing happens over in
the cemetery complex that yousee today over on Broadway.
It's in the Trinity EpiscopalCemetery there, kind of in the
(29:45):
southeast portion of thatcemetery complex.
And what they do is they decideto bury, uh, Edward Lee and his,
his, uh, captain, uh, JonathanMayhew Wainwright they, they're
gonna bury'em both at aceremony.
And it's remarkable because theyassemble the union prisoners
that they have, quite a few ofthem, Massachusetts troops.
(30:07):
And they assemble those unionprisoners and the Confederates
in the area.
And then Albert Lee reads theEpiscopal burial Service over
the grave of his son.
And Jonathan Wainwright was amason.
So the local masons say thatsince he was a basin, we're
gonna bury him with Masonichonors.
(30:27):
And so there's a Masonicceremony with the Confederate,
uh, reading the, uh, burialservice over his son.
And it's a, it's a veryrespectful thing where people
just came together on oneoccasion and, and honored
somebody who had, had made a,uh, the sacrificed their life.
And the neat thing about that isif you go there today, there's
(30:48):
just a little burial marker.
It's a very simple thing.
It says, Edward Lee, uh, killedJanuary 1st, 1863 Galveston and
has a little broken anchor onthe top of it.
And then it says down at thebottom, my father is here.
And to me, you know, that thatmay be the best Civil War marker
or monument I could ever thinkof because of the story behind
(31:11):
it and the story ofreconciliation that kind of
starts there the day after theBattle of Galveston.
And it's kind of still somethingwe're all coming to grips with
today.
J.R. (31:22):
Before we move on to Juneteenth and, uh, built, you
know, coming into that entirestory here in Galveston, is
there anything else you wouldlike to cover that I may have
missed to ask you about theBattle of Galveston that you
particularly like to, uh, letpeople know about?
Ed Cotham (31:39):
No, I think the, the, the interesting thing is there
are very few battles, uh, wherethe, the Confederates have joint
operations where you have a landpart and an and a sea part.
And when you consider theGeneral Magruder came down here
from Virginia with absolutelynothing.
(31:59):
To in a month put together anassault that involves artillery
pieces, soldiers, and improvisedgunboats, and then have it work
has to be one of the wildeststories of the entire Civil War.
And usually I, I've given thistalk all across the country,
now, and, you know, when I'm upin a place like Chicago, I
usually preface it by saying,I'm gonna tell you about the
(32:19):
battle of Galveston.
It's the wildest thing in theentire Civil War.
And I can see these audienceskind of leaning back and say,
oh, okay.
Yeah.
And then I've had many peoplecome up afterwards and say, you
know, you told that story andthat was the wildest battle of
the Civil War.
And you know, it's just kind ofremarkable.
We have that kind of thing hereand it, it's, it's worth a a lot
(32:40):
of, uh, study, I think.
J.R. (32:44):
Okay.
So we are nearing the end of theCivil War.
Um, we're in June of 1865.
What is it like here inGalveston and can you tell us
what is about to happen?
What is, what is coming up?
Ed Cotham (33:01):
Okay.
Again, Galveston's the lastmajor confederate port anywhere,
and it's really, you know, Texasis gonna be the last major state
to, to surrender of the war.
And so everybody can kind of seewhat happen, but nobody really
knows what is going to happen interms of how this transition is
going to work.
And it's worked out very poorlyall around the south because
(33:25):
the, the end of the war doesn'tcome with any kind of negotiated
settlement.
There won't be any kind ofarrangement for how the
transition's gonna happenbetween a, a brand new
government.
There's no transition betweenagain, particularly slavery and
emancipation and who's gonnatake care of these people and
what's gonna happen to'em andhow all that's gonna be be
happening.
(33:46):
I mean, general Grant and Leebasically kind of cut the
framework for what's gonnahappen with these giant
Confederate armies.
There's not gonna be anynegotiation 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 theend of the war for Galveston,
(34:11):
we're gonna be sort of the lastbastion of the Confederacy down
here.
And by my count, there are, bythis point, well over 250,000
enslaved people in Texas.
And Texas is not like the otherConfederate states.
In, in the other Confederatestates.
You've had union armies marchingback and forth through them all
(34:32):
the time.
And so a lot of the enslavedpeople get freed incidentally as
part of that or escaped thatsort of thing.
That does not happen in Texas.
So you, you have Texas havingthe last large pocket.
Of enslaved individuals in theentire Confederacy, and nobody
is quite sure how that's gonnawork out.
And Galveston in particular, asthe end approaches, it becomes
(34:57):
incredibly chaotic.
The people of Galveston kind ofstart returning to the city as
they can kind of start gettingready to resume, uh, the
operation of the city.
They come back to find theircity devastated.
So you got people trying torebuild, you've got crime
everywhere.
I mean, the, the law and orderis just completely out of hand
down here.
(35:18):
In addition to that, you haveprisoners that are being
returned, uh, on a daily basis.
Large numbers of people,including the main, uh, force of
Hoods, Texas brigade, come inalmost the day before
Juneteenth.
You have hoards of people cominginto the state in addition to
large groups of federal troops.
So Galveston, which was neverreally set up for this kind of
(35:40):
population, is suddenly just.
Beset with this entirepopulation 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 arriveon the morning of June 19th,
1865, uh, with some veryspecific instructions about what
(36:03):
to do.
J.R. (36:07):
Well, I'm just gonna pass this right back to you.
So, all right.
What were those specificinstructions?
Ed Cotham (36:15):
So this is a detective story that I went
through in writing the book onJune 10th because I, I don't
know if you've done this like Ihave, but, uh, every June 19th
in the newspaper, they would,they would.
Put some, a story in there aboutwhat happened in Galveston on
June 19th, and it usually wouldsay something like, you know,
general Granger went on the topof a balcony and read an order
(36:36):
and told everybody that theywere free, and, and that was,
that was Juneteenth.
And the order that they werequote, it would just have one
sentence that all slaves arefree.
And I thought, you know, that,that sounds odd.
I wonder what the rest of thatorder says.
So I, I actually looked up theoriginal order and read it, and
it consists of four sentences.
(36:57):
The first of which does say, youknow, in accordance with Abraham
Lincoln's EmancipationProclamation, all slaves are
free.
The the third and fourthsentence, I'll talk about in a
moment.
The third and fourth sentencesays, okay, even though you're
free, we want you to stay rightwhere you are and keep working
for the same old people.
For now, we'll get back to you.
(37:17):
This freedom thing, we'll getback to you.
But right now, stay exactlywhere you are.
Keep doing what you're doing.
And I said, okay, now I know whythey don't print the rest of
that, that order in thenewspaper, because it's really
kind of insulting if you look atit on in modern terms.
And then you go to the secondsentence of that order and the
second sentence of the order isincredibly beautiful.
(37:38):
It says, uh, freedom meansabsolutely equality and absolute
equality means a complete, youknow, equality between uh,
people of all, you know, it's adefinition of what absolute
equality means.
And I says, boy, this does notsound like it was written by the
same person because you've gotthis boiler plate thing about
freedom at the first, theseinsulting two sentences at the
(38:00):
end and this beautiful thing inthe middle.
And so again, I've worked onthis for 40 years and when I
finally figured it all out, whathappened was, Over in Louisiana.
They, they had the same problemthat we were fixing to have.
They sent a general up toShreveport to take over from the
Confederates up there.
And Shreveport was a completemess.
(38:21):
They'd had flooding, uh, their,their crops were failing and,
and they had huge numbers ofenslaved people who now learned
they were free and they werecoming to the city and they were
talking to the people that, fromthe army that had arrived and
say, well, now that you've freedme, now you've gotta feed me.
And they didn't have thesupplies to do that.
So it was, it was a completehumanitarian crisis up there in
(38:44):
Louisiana.
And so a general named FrancisHerron decided, you know, I
don't know what to do, but whatwe've gotta do is tell these
people to go home and stay wherethey are.
And so he issued this ordersaying, you gotta go home and
stay where you are.
And that order was given, a copyof that order was given to
General Sheridan, Phil Sheridan,who was coming down into Orleans
(39:05):
to take over the entireoperation down in this part of
the South.
General Sheridan didn't, didn'tlike what Herron had done, but
he knew there was really noalternative.
And so he gave that order toGeneral Granger and his staff
and said, when you get toGalveston, basically issue an
order telling them that allslaves are free, but telling
(39:25):
them that they've gotta staywhere they are for the time
being.
So when Granger comes over toGalveston, that order is almost
a, a dead match for what GeneralSheridan told him to issue,
which was based on what hadhappened to Louisiana.
So what about that secondsentence?
The thing about Absolutely.
Quality, which again, isbeautiful.
No, no other order in the, inthe entire, uh, end of the war
(39:50):
is like that.
It's very unique.
Where does that come from?
It always bothered me.
And then one day I just got oneof those moments, kinda like
Homer Simpson said"doh" youknow, where, what I realized
General Granger didn't even signthe 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 hisstaff officers, a man named
(40:12):
Frederick W.
Emery.
And when I looked up FrederickW.
Emery and, and researched him, Ithink I was probably the first
person to figure this out.
Emory was a very uniqueindividual.
He'd been a newspaper editor ofan abolitionist newspaper in
Kansas before the war.
He'd actually come from thenortheast, from somewhere up in
New England.
(40:32):
But he'd settled in, in Kansas,become an abolitionist newspaper
editor.
He'd been a member of thelegislature there.
He joined the seventh Kansas,uh, which was a cavalry
regiment.
And his commanding officer, doyou know who his commanding
officer was?
It was the son of John Brown,the Martyr.
And these guys, this companythat he joined was hardcore
(40:55):
abolitionists.
These people would have meetingsand at the end they would sing
the John Brown song and vowed toavenge him.
So this guy was reallyanti-slavery.
And just by chance he ended upon General Granger's staff at
the end of the war.
And I'm sure he got handed this,this order from General Sheridan
(41:16):
saying, say this when you getthere.
And he put the first sentence inthe last two sentences there and
he said, you know, nobody toldme what to put in the middle of
this.
And he kind of used hiseditorial discretion and put
that beautiful sentence inthere.
And to us modern people, that'sthe only thing in the Juneteenth
order that really resonates andspeaks to us today.
(41:37):
So if you go down to the Strandand see that beautiful mural
there at 22nd and Strand where Iused to show people there's a
parking lot of nothing else.
Now you've got the Juneteenthmural there and what's the name
of that mural?
Absolute Equality.
And it has that beautifulsentence from the Juneteenth
order that was inserted by thisvery young staff officer on
(42:00):
General Granger staff.
And I don't know the GeneralGranger ever even saw that
order.
There's no indication that hedid, he certainly didn't sign
it.
Uh, but Major Emory did.
And, uh, we end up having thebasis for a national holiday in
this order that just because ofthe way it was written and the
way it was issued, got read tolots of people, got lots of
(42:22):
attention, and ended up beingcelebrated in, in a kind of a
strange way.
But to me, it's appropriatethat, uh, the war ends with
something that, that has such a,a, a beautiful resonating phrase
to it.
I'm glad we can celebrate ithere.
J.R. (42:38):
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 ofyour, uh, projects that you are
working on now.
Are you working on anything now?
Because I know you've got ahandful of books and you're
always doing something.
I want to hear about
Ed Cotham (42:51):
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 whatI'm, I'm doing now.
It's probably the wildest bookI've ever written.
The working title.
This book is called Rockets,tanks and Submarines.
The, uh, story about theconfederate, uh, innovations in
Texas, because you may besurprised to learn that, uh,
(43:15):
Texans actually experimentedduring the Civil War with
rockets.
And we actually had a, adedicated rocket core that
functioned down here in betweenGalveston and Houston.
And this is a hundred yearsbefore the Johnson Space Center
comes to Texas.
Now, it didn't work out verywell, but they were certainly
experimenting with rockets,tanks.
(43:37):
Uh, you know, I mentioned tanksearlier on.
Uh, General Magruder was, wasworking 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 wascalled a turret car.
(43:58):
Which would've had, it would'vebeen railroad iron armored on
wheels, and it would've had aturret like the uss Monitor with
a gun that could point in anydirection.
If you start thinking aboutthat, what is an armored turret
mounted gun on wheels?
It's one of the prototypes ofthe tank.
So we were actuallyexperimenting with that thing
(44:19):
during the Civil War.
And the last thing, uh, uh,submarines.
Now a lot of people don'trealize this, but you, you've
probably heard of the, thesubmarine HL Hunley that, uh,
was the first ship in, in, uh,uh, military history to sink an
enemy vessel in combat that wasin Charleston Harbor in February
of 1864.
Do you know who built thehunley?
(44:40):
The, the ownership of the Hunleywas made up three, uh, made up
of three parties.
Two thirds of those were Texans,and particularly people from
Port Lavaca at Lavaca at thetime.
And those guys helped.
Bill the Hunley, helped crew theHunley and they didn't stop
there.
They were actually buildingsubmarines all the way through
(45:01):
the end of the Civil War.
And we had two torpedo boats,which are kind of submersibles,
that were being built in Texasat the end of the war.
And we had one honest togoodness submarine, which was a
lot like the HL Hunley we havespy reports from Union Spies
that they actually had asubmarine here, uh, that was
being built here.
(45:21):
And at the end of the war, whenthey take over, we, the reports
we have are that the unionseized this vessel and ended up,
uh, basically turning back toits, uh, owners for scrap.
But they were experimenting withall these wild technologies and
kind of throwing it up againstthe wall to see what worked.
And, you know, what reallyworked the best, the most
(45:41):
shocking thing that worked, thatwas designed by Texans.
Were torpedoes, which we wouldcall mines today, but there were
floating mines.
And these guys from Lavaca thathad been attacked, uh, by Union
Gunboats in the, in the, uh,November of 1862, decided they
were going to build some minesto help, uh, protect their
waters against the uniongunboats.
(46:03):
And they worked so well thatthey were take, these guys were
sent on to Mobile and toRichmond and to North Carolina
and all of these differentplaces, 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 MobileBay by, uh, Admiral Farragut,
(46:25):
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 hisvessels does that, and it's
blown up and sunk.
When he says, damn thetorpedoes, he's damning the
Texas torpedoes because allthose torpedoes were made by
Texans and installed by Texans.
And the arrangements we have,the arrangements under which
(46:46):
they were made and put into thewaters, and they got a specified
percentage of any of the, theunion ships, uh, that were sunk.
So it's a, a fascinating, kindof an untold story of the Civil
War and, and, uh, it, it'ssomething that is kind of
homegrown here and something Idon't think anybody really
realizes about.
J.R. (47:06):
That's fascinating.
When I drive through Port Lavacatoday, 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 theCivil War, let's, uh, could you,
could you tell us a little bitabout, uh, reconstruction and
then in 1880, the celebrity thatshows up here in Galveston?
Ed Cotham (47:32):
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 thingif you think about it, because
at the outset of the Civil Wargrant was a sort of a
disappointed and depressed storeclerk in Galena, Illinois in a
store he didn't even own.
(47:52):
And within 10 years, he isgeneral in chief of the United
States Army and is president ofthe United States.
Now, there's no other country inthe world where that kind of,
uh, uh, rise could possiblyhappen.
But again, things go very badlywrong after the, the end of the
Civil War because again, what wetalked about earlier, there's
(48:13):
no, there's no negotiatedtransition between the end of
the confederacy and the adventof, of, you know, the union
government as it is restoredthere.
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.
(48:33):
And into that chaos steps ofvery un wholesome elements,
including people like the KuKlux Klan, which grant will have
to fight, uh, during theentirety of his two terms in
office.
But at the end of, uh, grant'sterms, uh, they'll have this
election in 1876.
It's a complete disaster.
(48:53):
And, you know, if we think ourlast election was contested,
that was heavily contested on anumber of different fronts, and
it ends up being resolved in, ina kind of what they call a
corrupt bargain, which is thatthey'll, they'll let one of the,
uh, candidates take thepresidency, but in return for
that, uh, all the troops willbe, all the union troops will be
(49:14):
removed from the south.
And when that happens, then theelements take over in Texas and
in the other places in theSouth, 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 issick of things up there.
(49:34):
And after the, after hispresidency, he decides to take a
trip around the world and heliterally goes around the world.
He goes to Japan, he goes toEgypt.
And what's interesting aboutthat is he, he has a newspaper
reporter around along with himwho starts sending back accounts
of grant's, visits to all thesedifferent, uh, kings and queens
(49:54):
and potentates all around theworld.
And people read about Grant andthe way he's received and
suddenly they start liking Grantmore.
And it's just, he gets goodpublicity and it just keep
coming back a steady stream ofit.
So when Grant comes back at theend of this journey in, in 1878
and 79, uh, he finds thatunexpectedly there's a huge
(50:17):
movement afoot for him to benamed to a third term as
president.
And Grant says he doesn't carewhether he's or not, he really
does not care.
He'll, he'll do it if peoplewant it, but he, he's not gonna
seek it for himself, but hispolitical advisors want it.
And so they say, you know, thattraveling thing worked out
really well for you.
Let's do some more of that.
(50:38):
So they send him out on anothertrip, and this time Grant says,
all right, I'm not going veryfar.
I'll go to Cuba and I'll go toMexico.
because he wants to show hiswife 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 toGalveston.
So they take off from Vera Cruzalmost, uh, their ship almost
(50:59):
goes down in a horrible storm.
But they arrive here, here inGalveston, March of 1880 and
Grant arrives as the biggestcelebrity that ever hit Texas.
And I, I would say he's probablythe biggest celebrity who's ever
hit Texas up to this point.
I mean, we've this guy, it waslike, be like the Pope and Elvis
Presley showed up on the sameday.
This, this is big time.
(51:21):
Fame, and nobody in Galvestonhad ever seen him in person.
Everybody wanted to see him.
People were on the roofs to seehim.
Huge parade takes him over tothe Tremont Hotel.
And we have probably the mostfamous social event in Galveston
history in the the Tremonthouse, uh, ballroom on that one
night, he'll spend about a weekin Texas and leave.
(51:42):
But the interesting thing isGrant comes to Texas in 1880.
Now remember, 1865 is the end ofthe war.
Texas is a heavily confederatestate.
You would have thought thatpeople in Texas, these
ex-confederates would hate him.
Right?
That's what I thought cominginto the research.
No, they love Grant.
(52:03):
Everybody waits in line to shakehis hand.
He's a big celebrity.
Everybody loves him.
Partly because, again, the wayhe treated Robert E.
Lee at the end of the war.
Uh, he could have made thingsreally difficult for Lee and his
army in terms of thesurrendered, but he had been
generous in the terms heoffered.
And even after the war when,when, uh, forces up North wanted
(52:25):
to indict Lee for treason and,and basically put him and the
other people in prison, grantstood up and said, I will not
stand for this.
I gave this man my word that hewould be not molested in terms
of the surrender and stood upfor 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
(52:49):
thing that ever happened in the,in the 19th century in
Galveston.
J.R. (52:54):
All right.
So we have just a few minutesleft, about eight minutes left.
I'm gonna open it up to Q and Afrom anyone here.
Does anyone have any questions?
Ruth (53:04):
I have one.
This is about Galveston.
During that blockade because myfamily was here.
My great-aunt was born in 1861.
So that meant she was just aninfant.
And my grandfather was three orfour.
So I just wondered, what, whatwould the effect on people that
were here?
Ed Cotham (53:19):
Well, to begin with, there weren't very many people
here because very early in thewar, once they figured out that,
uh, the, the union ships couldbombard the city at any time,
and they did have one of thosebombardments in 1861, uh, most
of the, the residents leftexcept the ones that were real,
uh, union supporters, most ofthem left.
So, for example, the, uh, theGalveston newspaper was printed
(53:42):
in Houston for the entireremainder of the war, even
though it said the Galvestonnews, it's printed in Houston,
and there are very few peoplehere in 1862 until, until
Galveston is recapture.
And so when Galveston isrecaptured, you know, there's
this question about, well, isthis gonna last or not?
And they manage to kind of, Uh,you know, last long enough to
(54:04):
build the fortifications aroundthe city, then you do start to
get some people coming back intothe city.
But it's not like it was beforethe war, or like, it's gonna be
at the end of the war, not thatkind of population.
And the people that do comeback, uh, have a very difficult
time because you can't, youdon't have, uh, you know, the
shops are not really open toservice anything.
(54:25):
You can't do the kind of thingsyou would've normally done.
You know, galveston's big thingwas, was shipping and, and
working on, on ships, things todo with, with vessels,
transactions.
You can't do any of that.
So it doesn't really work outvery well for these people.
And the crime is terrible.
At one point in 1864, uh, theConfederate Signal Corps officer
(54:48):
comes down from the, uh,building where the Mod Coffee
House is today, and he justwalks out the door and he's,
he's robbed, uh, by a guy with agun and he's shot in the leg.
And they take off with, uh,$200of money.
And, uh, uh, Lindsay, who's thelieutenant Lindsay, who's the
name of the signal corps guy,says that the only thing that
(55:08):
that made him feel better aboutthat loss was that the money was
completely worthless about ayear later.
Oh my.
J.R. (55:17):
Anything else?
Ethan (55:18):
Have you heard accounts of people finding cannonballs in
their houses or in their yards?
Is there truth that there wouldbe cannonballs from the battle
that they were found afterwards?
and if so, was it a danger?
Ed Cotham (55:28):
Yes.
There, there, there have beeniron found all over the island
from the, not only the battle ofGalveston, but there were
several bombardments, both fromthe Gulf and from inside the
harbor that would've left alarge quantity of iron there.
And, and we have, we have someexamples here in the museum.
I mean, the museum on the thirdfloor, for example, of some iron
that hit the Hendley building.
(55:48):
But there's, there's a, a, astructure.
I know that there's a housecalled the, the, uh, Grover
house over on, on Market Streetthat still stands there today.
And I remember reading theaccount of a guy who was, was a
child in that house in, in the18, late 18 hundreds.
And he said whenever they neededfishing weights, they would just
go over to the back of thathouse and you could find iron
(56:09):
sitting all over the placethere.
But there, there are some actualexamples of people finding
shells on, uh, Galveston anddigging'em up.
And we have one account where,where a young boy was actually
trying to open one of them upand see what it was in it, and
it exploded, killed him.
So, uh, that kind of put akibosh on that, but, You know,
(56:31):
again, we, we, we did theexcavation on a war ship called
the Westfield, which was foundin Galveston Bay and, and
excavated that.
But when we did that, we foundhuge quantities of, uh, civil
War ordinance that had to be,uh, basically the, you know, the
Marine Corps to come in and, anddrill and, and safely remove the
powder from that to make itsafe.
J.R. (56:53):
Um,
Henry (56:54):
What consequences did Houston's anti secessionist
states have on him politicallyand personally?
Ed Cotham (56:59):
Well, that, and that's an interesting subject
because if you go to, uh, it's Ithink the corner of 22nd and
post office, that's where theold, uh, Tremont Hotel used to
be.
I guess it's 23rd and postoffice, that's the old Tremont
Hotel.
It's also a parking lot today.
That was the first one, and.
Houston came in 1861 and wasdetermined to give a speech to
(57:21):
the people of Galveston aboutwhy he did not support secessiom
and had his position on it.
And this was put in the paperthat 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 killyou.
And, and Houston said, I'm gonnado it.
And rode over here at that time,because there wasn't, wasn't
(57:41):
actually a, a road over here.
Got over here, went over to the,the, uh, balcony of the Tremont
Hotel and was getting ready togo 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 theold traitor, which, you know,
wouldn't encourage me to speakvery well.
I don't know about you, butHouston went up there and
(58:03):
delivered about a 30 minutespeech, which is transcribed and
we have copies of, it's a, it'sa beautiful speech.
And what he said was this, Hesaid, uh, you may win Southern
May, independence for the South,but I doubt it.
And he said, you, when you lookat all the resources that are
aligned against you, you don'thave the resources to compete
with these people.
But he said, you've made yourdecision.
(58:25):
I stand with Texas and I'm goingto to support the state.
And of course, his son, uh,would actually serve in the
Confederate army.
And, uh, although Houston wasagain, had opposed a session,
uh, when he had been offered theopportunity by Abraham Lincoln
to get the support of federaltroops to try and stay in
(58:46):
office, Houston had turned thatdown.
And so I think that probablydiminished his reputation
shortly there, uh, among Texans.
But in the long term, I don'tknow that it had any, any
perceptible, uh, effect on hisreputation.
J.R. (59:02):
Everyone, thank you so much for joining us this evening
for Galveston Unscripted at theRosenberg Library.
This episode comes from theRosenberg Library Conversation
series where I sat down with afew historians to talk about
some extremely interestinghistorical facts about Galveston
and Texas history.
I would like to personally thankthe Rosenberg Library for
(59:23):
allowing Galveston Unscripted tohold live podcast conversations
in the library.
J.R. (2) (59:29):
If this is your first time listening to Galveston
Unscripted, be sure to subscribeto the podcast.
If you've listened or watchedbefore and you enjoy the content
we are putting out in audio andvideo, please make sure to like,
subscribe and review thepodcast.
Leave us a review, leave us arating.
It really helps other peoplefind what we are doing here at
(59:49):
Galveston Unscripted.
Your rating and review helpsother people find Galveston
Unscripted and discover theamazing history of our little
island.
And be sure to follow us onFacebook, Instagram, TikTok, all
those social media platforms.
J.R. (01:00:03):
When I drive through Port Lavaca today, the last thing I
think of is submarine building.
I got interested in some Irishmen that were fighting
there during the Battle ofGalveston on the artillery side.
Blockade running was a big thinghere in Galveston.
I knew that a civil war battle,an important battle, had taken
place here in 1863.
I would say, you're not gonnabelieve this, but this is where
Juneteenth actually originated.
(00:21):
I had a lot of people on mytours that would say, June,
what?
They had never heard of it.
J.R. (00:26):
Welcome to Galveston Unscripted.
This episode comes from theRosenberg Library Conversation
series where I sat down with afew historians to talk about
some extremely interestinghistorical facts about Galveston
and Texas history.
I would like to personally thankthe Rosenberg Library for
allowing Galveston Unscripted tohold live podcast conversations
(00:47):
in the library.
This conversation series wassuch a great experience and I
really look forward to pickingit up again in the fall of 2023.
And a very huge thank you to ourguests.
Now this episode with Mr.
Ed Cotham is about an hour long,but trust me, you are gonna
wanna stick around and listenthrough the entire thing.
(01:08):
We discussed the Civil War inTexas, and the Battle of
Galveston and some otherhistorical aspects of the 1860s
here in Texas.
J.R. (2) (01:17):
Check the link in the description for the direct links
to the books that our guest haswritten.
If this is your first timelistening to Galveston
Unscripted, be sure to subscribeto the podcast.
If you've listened or watchedbefore and you enjoy the content
we are putting out in audio andvideo, please make sure to like,
subscribe and review thepodcast.
(01:38):
Leave us a review, leave us arating.
It really helps other peoplefind what we are doing here at
Galveston Unscripted.
Your rating and review helpsother people find Galveston
Unscripted and discover theamazing history of our little
island.
And be sure to follow us onFacebook, Instagram, TikTok, all
those social media platforms.
J.R. (01:57):
without further ado, let's hop into this episode with Mr.
Ed Cotham.
Hi everybody.
If you guys don't know me, myname is JR.
I started Galveston Unscripted,a podcast about, um, it was July
of 2021 and I started it in mycloset.
Uh, and started building audioguides that paired with my
running tour.
(02:18):
Um, so I started recording theseaudio guides and then started
interviewing people, and it'sjust kind of grown and expanded,
and I am so honored to be ableto sit here at the Rosenberg
library and sit with people likeEd and discuss our city and
Texas, and, um, how the islandthat we live on is just such an
(02:38):
important piece of history inthis, in this state and in this
country.
So, um, thank y'all so much forjoining 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 longbio here, so I'm just gonna hit
the highlights.
All right.
So Ed retired in 2023 as a ChiefInvestment Officer of the Terry
(03:01):
Foundation in Houston.
The Terry Foundation is thelargest private sector or
private source of scholarshipsin at Texas universities.
Ed holds an undergraduate degreein economics from the University
of Houston and a master's degreein economics from the University
of Chicago.
Ed returned to Texas to obtain alaw degree from the University
(03:21):
of Texas.
Ed is the is the, a formerpresident of the Houston Civil
War Roundtable and is active inthe Civil War preservation
Movement.
In 2011, ed received thePresident's award for
distinguished volunteer servicefrom the Galveston Historical
Foundation.
He is a life member of the CivilWar Preservation Trust.
Uh, he has plenty of Civil Warawards and awards from all over
(03:45):
the country.
Um, so I'm just gonna list off afew of his books here.
Uh, his published works includeBattle on the Bay, the Civil War
Struggle for Galveston, which wewill discuss a little bit about
today.
Sabine pass, the Confederacy'sther monopoly, the Southern
journey of a Civil War Marine,the illustrated notebook of
Henry O Gusley.
(04:06):
A busy week in Texas.
Ulysses s Grant's 1880, visit tothe Lone Star State and
Juneteenth the story behind thecelebration.
All right, so am I missinganything, ed?
I don't think so.
Okay, gotcha.
All right.
So Ed, um, he's been on mypodcast before and we discussed
the Battle of Galveston.
Um, and I, I really wanted todive into a little bit of Ed's
(04:29):
background and how he got into,um, how he got into Civil War
history in the first place.
So, ed, could you tell us howyou got into Civil War history
and how you, how you got intoGalveston
Ed Cotham (04:41):
history?
Sure.
JR I'm delighted to be here thethis evening to, to talk with
you about one of my favoritesubjects, which is Civil War
Things connected with Galveston.
I got interested in the CivilWar very early, and I can
remember my mother taking meparticularly to the Vicksburg
Battlefield because we had somefamily over that way.
(05:01):
Uh, early on in life and I gotreally interested in civil war
history in that connection.
But, you know, coming back toTexas, we didn't have much in
the way of civil warbattlefields that you could
visit, at least at that time.
And I, I didn't really keepthat, that, uh, interest as
fresh as I could until I got tocollege.
And then I got hooked on, uh, acouple of books, particularly
(05:23):
Bruce Catton's history of, ofthe Civil War and, and got back
into it.
And then eventually I startedwondering what, what happened in
Texas during the Civil War?
And my wife and I had a weekendplace down here in Galveston.
And so I actually came here tothe Rosenberg library at the
time and I went up to theGalveston, Texas History Center,
(05:45):
which, uh, I, I will say withwithout reservation, as one of
the great archives in the UnitedStates to research anything
connected with history and.
I was up there and I, and I wentup to, to one of the archivists
at the time, and I said, I'dlike to see the book on the
Battle of Galveston, because Iknew that a civil war battle, an
(06:06):
important battle, had takenplace here in January of 1863.
And the archivist at that timesaid, well, hate to tell you,
but there's not really one.
And I said, there's not onethat's, that's hard to imagine.
And I kept waiting, waiting,figuring that somebody out there
had to be writing a book on thisimportant battle.
(06:26):
Well, five years went by andnobody did.
And I finally said, you know,this is interesting enough.
I'm just gonna do this.
And so it took me five years toresearch and write my first
book, which was on the Battle ofGalveston.
The University of Texas Presswas kind enough to actually
publish that book.
And I got hooked on it.
And it's, it's the way thisworks.
(06:47):
And I know there are a number ofauthors here in the room that
will tell you the same thing.
When you're working on a projectlike that, you see something
interesting.
And in the case of the, of theBattle of Galveston, I got
interested in some little, uh,Irishmen that were fighting
there during the Battle ofGalveston on the artillery side.
And I, I knew that they hadsomething to do with the Battle
(07:07):
of Sabine Pass.
So I followed them over andwrote a book on the Battle of
Sabine Pass.
And while I was writing the bookin the Battle of Sabine Pass, I
got interested in the ships thatwere used by the union in that
battle and the, the Battle ofGalveston.
So I followed that out to thesouthern journey of a Civil War
Marine.
And it's kind of snowballedsince then.
And as many of you know, I'vegotten to where I give a lot of
(07:30):
tours of Civil War, Galveston,particularly around the battles
anniversary at the beginning ofJanuary of 1863.
And as I would leave peoplearound this city, it always
struck me that there were somethings that I would point to
that didn't have historicmarkers to do with it, and
nobody had ever really covered.
And in particular, I remembergoing by.
(07:53):
This lot at the corner of 22ndand Strand and I would point to
the parking lot and saysomething incredibly important
happened on this site of thisparking lot.
And I would say, you're notgonna believe this, but this is
where Juneteenth actuallyoriginated.
(08:13):
And people at the time, now I'vebeen doing this for all close to
40 years, and I would give thesetours and back in the early days
I had a lot of people on mytours that would say, June,
what?
They had never heard of it.
And then I would get people thatthey would say, you mean that
thing that happened where theyhave like barbecues and parades
and stuff?
And I would say, yeah, but ithas a whole lot more to do with
it than that.
(08:34):
That's, that's not really thestory at all.
And I kind of kept waiting forsomebody to write a book that
really covered what actuallyhappened in Galveston on June
19th, 1865.
And kinda like my first book,nobody really did.
And so I finally got up thenerve to actually write that
book, and it came out in jr.
(08:56):
You know, this, it, it came outand I, this was absolute dumb
luck, but it came out and thenthree 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 threateningto write a book on Arbor Day
just to kind of cover the restof the holidays.
But, but as you can see, I'vegotten really interested in, in
(09:18):
Galveston and, and Texas historyin the Civil War.
It kind of followed that threadall through my work.
J.R. (09:24):
All right.
That's great.
Um, so I would like to take a, ahigh level view of Texas
entering the Civil War and thedecisions behind Texas entering
the Civil War and hone in onGalveston.
So could you give us a briefoverview of, I guess, the
decision for Texas to enter theCivil War?
Ed Cotham (09:45):
Sure.
Uh, I mean, Texas is the seventhstate to join the Confederacy,
so Texas is by no means thefirst to do that.
South Carolina, of course, comesout, uh, uh, of the gate
swinging, uh, very heavy.
And Texas was kind of, took kindof a measured approach.
And I think in large part, thatwas due to the leadership in
Texas at that time.
And in particular, Sam Houston.
(10:06):
Sam Houston did not at allfavor, uh, secession he, he was
really opposed to that.
Uh, and he fought that as longand as hard as he could.
He delayed having a secessionconvention like everywhere else.
And when it came, he saw to itwith some, some people there
that in instead of Texas justvoting to leave at a convention,
(10:28):
that they put it up to a popularvote and all that kind of
delayed Texas leaving the unionand, and going in favor of the
south.
And there was also a question.
It, it was not just a questionof whether Texas would leave the
union.
There was also the question ofwhat Texas would leave the union
for, because there was, we'dbeen a republic, the Republic of
(10:51):
Texas was still an option, and Ithink maybe Sam Houston in the
back of his mind still had somesort of idea that if Texas left
the union, maybe they would goback into a republic or
something, that they didn't needto join the rest of the cotton
South at that time.
And so that was very delayed andfinally happened.
(11:11):
But we did have this vote.
The interesting thing to meabout the way that we left, uh,
the union was, if you look atthe vote now, it's, it's very
heavily in favor of secession.
Most places, although there aresome counties, particularly
where there are large Germanpopulation or you know,
immigrant populations wheresecession did not, did not pass
(11:34):
a lot.
Galveston was not one of thoseplaces.
Galveston voted heavily in favorof secession and at first you
kind of wonder what were thosepeople thinking?
Because Galveston was thelargest port in Texas growing at
the rate of 50% per year.
It was an insane place to becommercially at the outset
(11:56):
before the war began.
And almost as soon as the warbegan, of course, uh, the Union
blockades Galveston.
And so Galveston ends up beingcommercially hurt worse than any
other place in the state duringthe balance of the Civil War.
So it didn't work out forGalveston very well, at least
(12:17):
during the war.
Uh, but you know, that's sort ofthe, the whole operation
throughout the war iseverybody'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 enthusiasticwhen they do.
And if you look at the number oftroops that Texas provided as a
percentage of the adult whitepopulation, it's very, very high
(12:41):
and compares with anywhere elsein the Confederacy.
J.R. (12:46):
So you mentioned that, uh, Galveston was economically, uh,
hurt by entering the, enteringthe Civil War.
And, um, so I know Galveston wasblockade by the Union and
Galveston, and one question Iget very often is about the
Blockade runners, uh, hereleaving Galveston and running
that cotton out of the port ofGalveston.
(13:08):
Could you tell us a little bitabout Blockade Runners, and do
you, if you know any of thetactics that they used?
Ed Cotham (13:15):
Sure.
Blockade running was a big thinghere in Galveston.
And, and think about it thisway, at the end of the Civil
War, Galveston was the lastmajor Confederate port anywhere.
Anywhere in the Confederatestates.
And so as the war went on andthe union blockade became more
and more effective elsewhere inthe Confederacy, in places like
(13:36):
New Orleans are captured, andeventually mobile is captured,
and Savannah is captured inplaces like that, the number of
available ports for theconfederacy to get things out.
And in particular cotton, to getcotton out to some of these
places and trade that for highluxury goods or, or weapons, it
(13:57):
becomes increasingly restricted.
And so blockade running at theoutset of the war in Galveston
was easy, frankly.
Uh, there, they didn't have manyships that were dedicated down
here.
The ships that were dedicated tothe Galveston blockade.
Uh, were relatively old andeffective, and almost anybody
could block run the blockade.
(14:19):
At the beginning of the war, asthe blockade intensified and
became more concentrated off theentrance to Galveston Bay, the
Galveston blockade runners hadto get more sophisticated as
well.
And so we started having anumber of ships that were
purpose built to run theblockade in, in the in, usually
they were built in England orsomewhere abroad, and these
(14:40):
things were steamers, but theywere very low in the water, long
kind of cigar shaped things withvery little relief above the
water.
And they were painted gray sothey wouldn't stand out to the
union blockade ships.
They would pile those ships ashigh as they could with cotton.
And in Galveston, the way theydid it was they went to the top
of a building, a high building,and the building almost
(15:03):
universally chosen, was one thatstill stands today, the Henley
building.
At the corner of 20th and Strandand the blockade runner captains
would wait until there was aparticularly advantageous night.
Usually when it was hazy, maybestormy, that sort of thing.
Maybe foggy as we get from timeto time, they'd wait for those
nights and then just before itgot dark, they'd run to the roof
(15:26):
of the Henley building andthey'd sketch where all these
union blockading ships were ona, on a map and they'd figure
out, it's like football you'rerunning where there's no
defense.
Right?
And so they would run down justas it was getting dark, jump
onto their ship.
They'd already have the steamready and they'd paddle out and
run outta Galveston Harbor andrunning outta Galveston Harbor
(15:47):
with that kind of preparationwas enormously successful.
I think at least 90% of theships running out of of
Galveston were successful,probably for almost the entire
course.
The war, we have a number ofblockade, runner wrecks around
Galveston, but most of those arenot people going out.
There are people coming inbecause again, if you're coming
(16:10):
into Galveston, you had a wholedifferent approach.
You couldn't go to the top ofthe Henley building and figure
out where everybody was.
What you had to do was probablywait until it was just about
dawn, and then find a placewhere you could kind of squeeze
in closer to the coast for theunion blockades and sneak into
one of the channels.
And a lot of these blockaderunner captains didn't have a
(16:32):
whole lot of familiarity withGalveston waters, and they're
really treacherous to beginwith.
So kind of squeezing into someof those channels coming in, uh,
closer to the shore meant thatsome of these ran aground, and
particularly like one, like theDenbigh ran a, ran a ground not
too far from where the jetty istoday.
And that was a tricky operation,and that's where the, the
(16:53):
blockade, uh, kind of failedsometimes and resulted in these
wrecks.
But keep in mind, this wasenormously profitable if you
could run out of the blockade inGalveston.
Probably going out one way andcoming back with a cargo, you
would probably pay for yourentire ship on that one voyage.
(17:13):
And it was enormously profitableto do this.
So that's why it, as, as the warwent on, more and more blockade
runners were coming intoGalveston.
And by 1864, frankly, uh, theaccounts of the newspapers say
that anything that could floatthen was basically being used,
uh, to paddle out to sea andtake cotton as far as they could
(17:35):
get it, and, and, and take it toa place where they, where they
could sell it.
Now, some of the traffic wouldoverland into Mexico, but a lot
of it came outta Galveston onthese blockade runners and not
just Galveston.
It was also the case of SabinePass, uh, Matagorda Bay in a
number of other places.
But Galveston was the center ofblockade running here.
J.R. (17:56):
Okay, so let's get into it.
Uh, October of 1862, uh, theUnion Navy sales into Galveston.
Without a fight.
And they're, you know, they'redocked on, uh, along Galveston
from October to December 31st,1862.
Um, what goes on, I'll, I'm justgonna let you go with that one.
(18:16):
Let's, let's, can we hop rightinto the Battle of Galveston and
the events leading up to,
Ed Cotham (18:23):
so as you say, uh, Galveston was basically
surrendered to the union inOctober of 1862 without a fight.
They fired one gun and thenretreat to the mainland because
the general in charge of Texasat the time was a, a guy named
Paul Octave Hébert who was aformer governor, Louisiana West
Pointer.
He looked at a map and said, youknow, there's no way to defend
(18:44):
an island that's just silly.
Uh, if we're gonna defend thisplace, we just need to defend it
on the mainland.
And ultimately he built a bigfort over there, kind of where
the causeway reaches themainland today.
And that was called Fort Hébertin his honor.
But the, in, in the fall of1862, the Confederate leadership
(19:05):
in Richmond, uh, response to thepeople of Texas who are just
infuriated by this decision toabandon in Galveston Island.
And they send down here a veryunique individual, uh, general
John Bankhead Magruder.
Notice Prince John in the oldarmy.
And, uh, Magruder was the,probably the most unconventional
general of the entire Civil War.
(19:27):
And he gets down here anddecides that not only is he
going to try to recapture thecity of Galveston, but he's
gonna do it almost immediately.
So he gets to Houston inNovember of 1862, and he
launches one of the wildestbattle plans of the entire Civil
War on New Year's Eve between.
December, uh, 31st of 1862,January 1st, 1863.
(19:51):
And it's gonna have all kinds ofwild elements.
He's gonna have, uh, he's gonnasneak, uh, guns over to the, to
from mainland over the railroadbridge, take them to the
waterfront and fire them out atthe ships in the harbor, that
he's gonna have a waiting chargeagainst some of the union troops
that are on a wharf.
And then he's gonna have someimprovised gunboats that he's
(20:12):
made out of, of cottonsteamboats coming from Houston.
Then he loads up with big balesof cotton and all this is gonna
happen in the middle of thenight, and almost all of it goes
dead wrong.
I mean, you could not imagine aplan going absolutely worse, but
in the end he is gets absolutelydumb lucky.
(20:35):
And the union does some thingsthat are even stupider.
And so at the end of theevening, Uh, the, the federal
warship that's in charge ofGalveston, that, that, that's
under the command of, of, uh,Commodore William b Renshaw,
managed to run itself a groundout there on, on Pelican spit in
the middle of, of, uh, GalvestonHarbor.
(20:55):
And they decide they have toblow it up to keep it outta
Confederate hands.
They set the explosives and blowit up, but it blows up too soon
and kills Commodore Red Shaw inhis entire, uh, crew on that,
that boat.
And so what's left of the Unionfleet kind of limps out of
Galveston Harbor and the wildestbattle plan in the Civil War
(21:18):
that went wrong, almost from thebeginning ends up succeeding.
And so Galveston becomes theonly major port city that the
union ever captured.
And then the Confederatesrecaptured from the union.
It's, it becomes one of the, uh,shining success stories of the
Confederacy, and then theydecide they're going.
(21:40):
Put, uh, defenses around theisland and, and put
fortifications around theisland.
And Galveston will last all theway until June of 1865.
And Galveston will become thelast major port, and Texas will
end up being the mostsuccessfully defended
Confederate states.
And it's, it's really aremarkable achievement given how
(22:01):
little the Confederacy had towork with here.
So one thing that I
J.R. (22:07):
know interest, uh, a lot of my listeners and, and people
I talk to pretty often are thecotton clads.
And when I explained to themabout how they stacked
compressed cotton around thesecotton clads and how that was
maybe not enough armor, but itwas armor, nonetheless, um,
they're shocked that that waseven done or even used.
Um, could you tell us a littlebit about the cotton clads, the
(22:29):
process, the thinking and therecruiting for the cotton clads?
Ed Cotham (22:34):
Sure.
Well, keep in mind, I, Imentioned General Magruder.
General Magruder was in chargeof the Confederate army on the
peninsula leading up to Richmondin 1862.
So he is there when the ironcladmonitor in the ironclad Virginia
fight there at Hampton Roads.
And he watches that whole thingwith these iron clads.
(22:55):
Now he's gonna come down toTexas and, you know, he'd like
to build some iron cladshimself, but we don't have
enough iron around here toreally do that.
And he doesn't have the, theoperation to do that.
So he looks around and says,what do we have a lot of?
And it turns out that they havea whole bunch of cotton sitting
here that can't get out andwaiting for, uh, you know, an
exit strategy on blockaderunners, et cetera.
(23:17):
And so he says, maybe we can usethis cotton as the armament for
our ships.
And so they'll take two bigriver steamers, the Bayou City
and the Neptune number two.
And they will put these cottonbales all along the upper
structures of these vessels toprovide some armament.
And in particular for the menthat are behind that armament,
(23:41):
because Magruder expects thatcoming down in the middle of the
night to attack the union fleet.
He's, he's not probably gonna beable to disable those ships with
the, few cannon that are onthese ships.
He's gonna actually have to runthem, run into them and send
over boarding parties.
So he finds some men up kind ofnear College Station, frankly,
(24:03):
and they're part of the SibleyBrigade.
And he, these, these men aredismounted, cavalry, uh, troops.
And he asks if they willparticipate and become part of
the, the boarding parties onthese two Confederate cotton
clad ships.
And they say they will.
And so, uh, general Tom Greens,uh, agrees to have them do this,
(24:24):
and so they will become known inGalveston lore as the horse
Marines.
Because they were cavalrymenthat were serving as Marines on
board these, these cotton cladships.
The interesting part about thatis when you trace down where
these men came from, a lot ofthem were German, uh, troops
that spoke very little Englishup from the hill country.
(24:46):
And if you look at it, the, thelook at the accounts, these men,
when they volunteered to serveonboard these cotton clads, many
of these men had never been on aship before.
And the accounts say that someof these men had never even seen
a ship before.
So they had a very interestingservice as Marines in the middle
of the night onboard these,these cotton clads.
(25:08):
I might also mention what we'retalking about cotton armor.
One of the really unique thingsabout the battle of Galveston is
the use of cotton artillerybecause General Magruder was not
only interested in using cottonon board these steam ships, he
also had brought down a verylarge naval gun, a Dahlgren.
On a railroad car.
(25:28):
And they brought that over to,uh, the city of Galveston, kind
of near where the railroadmuseum is today.
And they brought that over andit was armored with cotton
bales.
And he had done the same thingin Virginia at a battle called
Savage's Station.
Uh, but he'd used iron on thatoccasion with railroad iron.
And they called that thatrailroad car with the iron, the
(25:52):
land Merry back because it was,uh, kind of an iron clad thing.
But he did that again inGalveston Arbor with, with
cotton.
What's interesting about that isthat that is the in Virginia was
the very first rail mountedartillery that had ever been
used in battle.
And the battle Galveston is onlythe second time in history that,
that, uh, that that, uh,configuration was used.
(26:16):
And as I'm sure we'll talk aboutlater, that's, that's sort of
the precursor to some othertechnology that, uh, Magruder
and his people wereexperimenting with here down in
Texas.
J.R. (26:28):
All right.
So I definitely want to cover,you know, towards the end of
this, I want to cover Juneteenthand, and some of the other
things you're working on.
So, to kind of tie up the Battleof Galveston, one story that you
told me that's very, verymoving, um, is the Edward and
Albert Lea story.
Could you tell us that story andkind of, you know, bring in all
(26:48):
the details and paint us apicture of what that would've
been like?
Ed Cotham (26:54):
So you always hear the stories about the Civil War
that, you know, father foughtagainst son or brother, fought
against brother and everything,but usually you don't actually
hear cases of where thatactually happened.
But we have a documented case ofthat here in Galveston.
And what happened was this, whenGeneral Magruder was getting
ready to launch his battle planhere at Texas, there were a
(27:14):
number of officers down in thearea that volunteered to serve
on his staff.
And one of the officers whovolunteered to serve was a man
named Albert Lea, l e a.
And Albert Lea had been at WestPoint with Magruder.
Magruder knew him very well.
He was a very experienced man.
And so during the battle ofGalveston, Albert Lee was kind
(27:34):
of his eyes and ears, and inparticular, he went to the top
of one of the tall buildingsnear Magruder s headquarters.
Magruder's headquarters werewhere the Sealy mansion is today
at basically at 25th andBroadway, about a block from
here and the tall building thatLee went up on to spy.
What was happening during thebattle was almost certainly the
(27:55):
building that we call AshtonVilla today.
But Lee is watching the battledevelop, and at the end of the
battle, one of the pivotalmoments is when these, these
confederate cotton plaids ramand seize control of a union
ship called the Harriet Lane,which was probably the best ship
in Galveston Harbor on that day.
(28:16):
Now unbeknownst, uh, to AlbertLea.
The first officer on board theunion ship, uh, Harriet Lane was
his son, Edward Lee, and theyhad not spoken since before the
war because they were prettywell estranged by, as you can
imagine, by the, the, theoncoming of the war.
But this was a battle in whichfather literally fought against
(28:40):
son Confederates versus theunion.
At the conclusion of the battle,Albert hurries over to the
waterfront because he knows hisson was on probably one of these
ships.
He's rode out to the, theHarriet Lane, goes on board it
and finds his son mortallywounded on the deck of that
vessel.
He runs over the two are brieflyreunited and uh, Albert goes
(29:03):
away trying to find some medicalattention to, to try and help
his his boy and he leaves.
And as he's gone, the, thesurgeons, which is both the
confederate and the unionsurgeon by this point, go keep
going over to the young officerand saying, uh, uh, Edward Lee,
is there anything we can do?
Is there anything we can do tohelp you?
(29:24):
And Edward keeps asserting overand over again, no, my father is
here.
My father is here.
He will die, uh, in that, inthat battle.
And the next day, um, aremarkable thing happens over in
the cemetery complex that yousee today over on Broadway.
It's in the Trinity EpiscopalCemetery there, kind of in the
(29:45):
southeast portion of thatcemetery complex.
And what they do is they decideto bury, uh, Edward Lee and his,
his, uh, captain, uh, JonathanMayhew Wainwright they, they're
gonna bury'em both at aceremony.
And it's remarkable because theyassemble the union prisoners
that they have, quite a few ofthem, Massachusetts troops.
(30:07):
And they assemble those unionprisoners and the Confederates
in the area.
And then Albert Lee reads theEpiscopal burial Service over
the grave of his son.
And Jonathan Wainwright was amason.
So the local masons say thatsince he was a basin, we're
gonna bury him with Masonichonors.
(30:27):
And so there's a Masonicceremony with the Confederate,
uh, reading the, uh, burialservice over his son.
And it's a, it's a veryrespectful thing where people
just came together on oneoccasion and, and honored
somebody who had, had made a,uh, the sacrificed their life.
And the neat thing about that isif you go there today, there's
(30:48):
just a little burial marker.
It's a very simple thing.
It says, Edward Lee, uh, killedJanuary 1st, 1863 Galveston and
has a little broken anchor onthe top of it.
And then it says down at thebottom, my father is here.
And to me, you know, that thatmay be the best Civil War marker
or monument I could ever thinkof because of the story behind
(31:11):
it and the story ofreconciliation that kind of
starts there the day after theBattle of Galveston.
And it's kind of still somethingwe're all coming to grips with
today.
J.R. (31:22):
Before we move on to Juneteenth and, uh, built, you
know, coming into that entirestory here in Galveston, is
there anything else you wouldlike to cover that I may have
missed to ask you about theBattle of Galveston that you
particularly like to, uh, letpeople know about?
Ed Cotham (31:39):
No, I think the, the, the interesting thing is there
are very few battles, uh, wherethe, the Confederates have joint
operations where you have a landpart and an and a sea part.
And when you consider theGeneral Magruder came down here
from Virginia with absolutelynothing.
(31:59):
To in a month put together anassault that involves artillery
pieces, soldiers, and improvisedgunboats, and then have it work
has to be one of the wildeststories of the entire Civil War.
And usually I, I've given thistalk all across the country,
now, and, you know, when I'm upin a place like Chicago, I
usually preface it by saying,I'm gonna tell you about the
(32:19):
battle of Galveston.
It's the wildest thing in theentire Civil War.
And I can see these audienceskind of leaning back and say,
oh, okay.
Yeah.
And then I've had many peoplecome up afterwards and say, you
know, you told that story andthat was the wildest battle of
the Civil War.
And you know, it's just kind ofremarkable.
We have that kind of thing hereand it, it's, it's worth a a lot
(32:40):
of, uh, study, I think.
J.R. (32:44):
Okay.
So we are nearing the end of theCivil War.
Um, we're in June of 1865.
What is it like here inGalveston and can you tell us
what is about to happen?
What is, what is coming up?
Ed Cotham (33:01):
Okay.
Again, Galveston's the lastmajor confederate port anywhere,
and it's really, you know, Texasis gonna be the last major state
to, to surrender of the war.
And so everybody can kind of seewhat happen, but nobody really
knows what is going to happen interms of how this transition is
going to work.
And it's worked out very poorlyall around the south because
(33:25):
the, the end of the war doesn'tcome with any kind of negotiated
settlement.
There won't be any kind ofarrangement for how the
transition's gonna happenbetween a, a brand new
government.
There's no transition betweenagain, particularly slavery and
emancipation and who's gonnatake care of these people and
what's gonna happen to'em andhow all that's gonna be be
happening.
(33:46):
I mean, general Grant and Leebasically kind of cut the
framework for what's gonnahappen with these giant
Confederate armies.
There's not gonna be anynegotiation 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 theend of the war for Galveston,
(34:11):
we're gonna be sort of the lastbastion of the Confederacy down
here.
And by my count, there are, bythis point, well over 250,000
enslaved people in Texas.
And Texas is not like the otherConfederate states.
In, in the other Confederatestates.
You've had union armies marchingback and forth through them all
(34:32):
the time.
And so a lot of the enslavedpeople get freed incidentally as
part of that or escaped thatsort of thing.
That does not happen in Texas.
So you, you have Texas havingthe last large pocket.
Of enslaved individuals in theentire Confederacy, and nobody
is quite sure how that's gonnawork out.
And Galveston in particular, asthe end approaches, it becomes
(34:57):
incredibly chaotic.
The people of Galveston kind ofstart returning to the city as
they can kind of start gettingready to resume, uh, the
operation of the city.
They come back to find theircity devastated.
So you got people trying torebuild, you've got crime
everywhere.
I mean, the, the law and orderis just completely out of hand
down here.
(35:18):
In addition to that, you haveprisoners that are being
returned, uh, on a daily basis.
Large numbers of people,including the main, uh, force of
Hoods, Texas brigade, come inalmost the day before
Juneteenth.
You have hoards of people cominginto the state in addition to
large groups of federal troops.
So Galveston, which was neverreally set up for this kind of
(35:40):
population, is suddenly just.
Beset with this entirepopulation 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 arriveon the morning of June 19th,
1865, uh, with some veryspecific instructions about what
(36:03):
to do.
J.R. (36:07):
Well, I'm just gonna pass this right back to you.
So, all right.
What were those specificinstructions?
Ed Cotham (36:15):
So this is a detective story that I went
through in writing the book onJune 10th because I, I don't
know if you've done this like Ihave, but, uh, every June 19th
in the newspaper, they would,they would.
Put some, a story in there aboutwhat happened in Galveston on
June 19th, and it usually wouldsay something like, you know,
general Granger went on the topof a balcony and read an order
(36:36):
and told everybody that theywere free, and, and that was,
that was Juneteenth.
And the order that they werequote, it would just have one
sentence that all slaves arefree.
And I thought, you know, that,that sounds odd.
I wonder what the rest of thatorder says.
So I, I actually looked up theoriginal order and read it, and
it consists of four sentences.
(36:57):
The first of which does say, youknow, in accordance with Abraham
Lincoln's EmancipationProclamation, all slaves are
free.
The the third and fourthsentence, I'll talk about in a
moment.
The third and fourth sentencesays, okay, even though you're
free, we want you to stay rightwhere you are and keep working
for the same old people.
For now, we'll get back to you.
(37:17):
This freedom thing, we'll getback to you.
But right now, stay exactlywhere you are.
Keep doing what you're doing.
And I said, okay, now I know whythey don't print the rest of
that, that order in thenewspaper, because it's really
kind of insulting if you look atit on in modern terms.
And then you go to the secondsentence of that order and the
second sentence of the order isincredibly beautiful.
(37:38):
It says, uh, freedom meansabsolutely equality and absolute
equality means a complete, youknow, equality between uh,
people of all, you know, it's adefinition of what absolute
equality means.
And I says, boy, this does notsound like it was written by the
same person because you've gotthis boiler plate thing about
freedom at the first, theseinsulting two sentences at the
(38:00):
end and this beautiful thing inthe middle.
And so again, I've worked onthis for 40 years and when I
finally figured it all out, whathappened was, Over in Louisiana.
They, they had the same problemthat we were fixing to have.
They sent a general up toShreveport to take over from the
Confederates up there.
And Shreveport was a completemess.
(38:21):
They'd had flooding, uh, their,their crops were failing and,
and they had huge numbers ofenslaved people who now learned
they were free and they werecoming to the city and they were
talking to the people that, fromthe army that had arrived and
say, well, now that you've freedme, now you've gotta feed me.
And they didn't have thesupplies to do that.
So it was, it was a completehumanitarian crisis up there in
(38:44):
Louisiana.
And so a general named FrancisHerron decided, you know, I
don't know what to do, but whatwe've gotta do is tell these
people to go home and stay wherethey are.
And so he issued this ordersaying, you gotta go home and
stay where you are.
And that order was given, a copyof that order was given to
General Sheridan, Phil Sheridan,who was coming down into Orleans
(39:05):
to take over the entireoperation down in this part of
the South.
General Sheridan didn't, didn'tlike what Herron had done, but
he knew there was really noalternative.
And so he gave that order toGeneral Granger and his staff
and said, when you get toGalveston, basically issue an
order telling them that allslaves are free, but telling
(39:25):
them that they've gotta staywhere they are for the time
being.
So when Granger comes over toGalveston, that order is almost
a, a dead match for what GeneralSheridan told him to issue,
which was based on what hadhappened to Louisiana.
So what about that secondsentence?
The thing about Absolutely.
Quality, which again, isbeautiful.
No, no other order in the, inthe entire, uh, end of the war
(39:50):
is like that.
It's very unique.
Where does that come from?
It always bothered me.
And then one day I just got oneof those moments, kinda like
Homer Simpson said"doh" youknow, where, what I realized
General Granger didn't even signthe 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 hisstaff officers, a man named
(40:12):
Frederick W.
Emery.
And when I looked up FrederickW.
Emery and, and researched him, Ithink I was probably the first
person to figure this out.
Emory was a very uniqueindividual.
He'd been a newspaper editor ofan abolitionist newspaper in
Kansas before the war.
He'd actually come from thenortheast, from somewhere up in
New England.
(40:32):
But he'd settled in, in Kansas,become an abolitionist newspaper
editor.
He'd been a member of thelegislature there.
He joined the seventh Kansas,uh, which was a cavalry
regiment.
And his commanding officer, doyou know who his commanding
officer was?
It was the son of John Brown,the Martyr.
And these guys, this companythat he joined was hardcore
(40:55):
abolitionists.
These people would have meetingsand at the end they would sing
the John Brown song and vowed toavenge him.
So this guy was reallyanti-slavery.
And just by chance he ended upon General Granger's staff at
the end of the war.
And I'm sure he got handed this,this order from General Sheridan
(41:16):
saying, say this when you getthere.
And he put the first sentence inthe last two sentences there and
he said, you know, nobody toldme what to put in the middle of
this.
And he kind of used hiseditorial discretion and put
that beautiful sentence inthere.
And to us modern people, that'sthe only thing in the Juneteenth
order that really resonates andspeaks to us today.
(41:37):
So if you go down to the Strandand see that beautiful mural
there at 22nd and Strand where Iused to show people there's a
parking lot of nothing else.
Now you've got the Juneteenthmural there and what's the name
of that mural?
Absolute Equality.
And it has that beautifulsentence from the Juneteenth
order that was inserted by thisvery young staff officer on
(42:00):
General Granger staff.
And I don't know the GeneralGranger ever even saw that
order.
There's no indication that hedid, he certainly didn't sign
it.
Uh, but Major Emory did.
And, uh, we end up having thebasis for a national holiday in
this order that just because ofthe way it was written and the
way it was issued, got read tolots of people, got lots of
(42:22):
attention, and ended up beingcelebrated in, in a kind of a
strange way.
But to me, it's appropriatethat, uh, the war ends with
something that, that has such a,a, a beautiful resonating phrase
to it.
I'm glad we can celebrate ithere.
J.R. (42:38):
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 ofyour, uh, projects that you are
working on now.
Are you working on anything now?
Because I know you've got ahandful of books and you're
always doing something.
I want to hear about
Ed Cotham (42:51):
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 whatI'm, I'm doing now.
It's probably the wildest bookI've ever written.
The working title.
This book is called Rockets,tanks and Submarines.
The, uh, story about theconfederate, uh, innovations in
Texas, because you may besurprised to learn that, uh,
(43:15):
Texans actually experimentedduring the Civil War with
rockets.
And we actually had a, adedicated rocket core that
functioned down here in betweenGalveston and Houston.
And this is a hundred yearsbefore the Johnson Space Center
comes to Texas.
Now, it didn't work out verywell, but they were certainly
experimenting with rockets,tanks.
(43:37):
Uh, you know, I mentioned tanksearlier on.
Uh, General Magruder was, wasworking 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 wascalled a turret car.
(43:58):
Which would've had, it would'vebeen railroad iron armored on
wheels, and it would've had aturret like the uss Monitor with
a gun that could point in anydirection.
If you start thinking aboutthat, what is an armored turret
mounted gun on wheels?
It's one of the prototypes ofthe tank.
So we were actuallyexperimenting with that thing
(44:19):
during the Civil War.
And the last thing, uh, uh,submarines.
Now a lot of people don'trealize this, but you, you've
probably heard of the, thesubmarine HL Hunley that, uh,
was the first ship in, in, uh,uh, military history to sink an
enemy vessel in combat that wasin Charleston Harbor in February
of 1864.
Do you know who built thehunley?
(44:40):
The, the ownership of the Hunleywas made up three, uh, made up
of three parties.
Two thirds of those were Texans,and particularly people from
Port Lavaca at Lavaca at thetime.
And those guys helped.
Bill the Hunley, helped crew theHunley and they didn't stop
there.
They were actually buildingsubmarines all the way through
(45:01):
the end of the Civil War.
And we had two torpedo boats,which are kind of submersibles,
that were being built in Texasat the end of the war.
And we had one honest togoodness submarine, which was a
lot like the HL Hunley we havespy reports from Union Spies
that they actually had asubmarine here, uh, that was
being built here.
(45:21):
And at the end of the war, whenthey take over, we, the reports
we have are that the unionseized this vessel and ended up,
uh, basically turning back toits, uh, owners for scrap.
But they were experimenting withall these wild technologies and
kind of throwing it up againstthe wall to see what worked.
And, you know, what reallyworked the best, the most
(45:41):
shocking thing that worked, thatwas designed by Texans.
Were torpedoes, which we wouldcall mines today, but there were
floating mines.
And these guys from Lavaca thathad been attacked, uh, by Union
Gunboats in the, in the, uh,November of 1862, decided they
were going to build some minesto help, uh, protect their
waters against the uniongunboats.
(46:03):
And they worked so well thatthey were take, these guys were
sent on to Mobile and toRichmond and to North Carolina
and all of these differentplaces, 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 MobileBay by, uh, Admiral Farragut,
(46:25):
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 hisvessels does that, and it's
blown up and sunk.
When he says, damn thetorpedoes, he's damning the
Texas torpedoes because allthose torpedoes were made by
Texans and installed by Texans.
And the arrangements we have,the arrangements under which
(46:46):
they were made and put into thewaters, and they got a specified
percentage of any of the, theunion ships, uh, that were sunk.
So it's a, a fascinating, kindof an untold story of the Civil
War and, and, uh, it, it'ssomething that is kind of
homegrown here and something Idon't think anybody really
realizes about.
J.R. (47:06):
That's fascinating.
When I drive through Port Lavacatoday, 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 theCivil War, let's, uh, could you,
could you tell us a little bitabout, uh, reconstruction and
then in 1880, the celebrity thatshows up here in Galveston?
Ed Cotham (47:32):
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 thingif you think about it, because
at the outset of the Civil Wargrant was a sort of a
disappointed and depressed storeclerk in Galena, Illinois in a
store he didn't even own.
(47:52):
And within 10 years, he isgeneral in chief of the United
States Army and is president ofthe United States.
Now, there's no other country inthe world where that kind of,
uh, uh, rise could possiblyhappen.
But again, things go very badlywrong after the, the end of the
Civil War because again, what wetalked about earlier, there's
(48:13):
no, there's no negotiatedtransition between the end of
the confederacy and the adventof, of, you know, the union
government as it is restoredthere.
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.
(48:33):
And into that chaos steps ofvery un wholesome elements,
including people like the KuKlux Klan, which grant will have
to fight, uh, during theentirety of his two terms in
office.
But at the end of, uh, grant'sterms, uh, they'll have this
election in 1876.
It's a complete disaster.
(48:53):
And, you know, if we think ourlast election was contested,
that was heavily contested on anumber of different fronts, and
it ends up being resolved in, ina kind of what they call a
corrupt bargain, which is thatthey'll, they'll let one of the,
uh, candidates take thepresidency, but in return for
that, uh, all the troops willbe, all the union troops will be
(49:14):
removed from the south.
And when that happens, then theelements take over in Texas and
in the other places in theSouth, 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 issick of things up there.
(49:34):
And after the, after hispresidency, he decides to take a
trip around the world and heliterally goes around the world.
He goes to Japan, he goes toEgypt.
And what's interesting aboutthat is he, he has a newspaper
reporter around along with himwho starts sending back accounts
of grant's, visits to all thesedifferent, uh, kings and queens
(49:54):
and potentates all around theworld.
And people read about Grant andthe way he's received and
suddenly they start liking Grantmore.
And it's just, he gets goodpublicity and it just keep
coming back a steady stream ofit.
So when Grant comes back at theend of this journey in, in 1878
and 79, uh, he finds thatunexpectedly there's a huge
(50:17):
movement afoot for him to benamed to a third term as
president.
And Grant says he doesn't carewhether he's or not, he really
does not care.
He'll, he'll do it if peoplewant it, but he, he's not gonna
seek it for himself, but hispolitical advisors want it.
And so they say, you know, thattraveling thing worked out
really well for you.
Let's do some more of that.
(50:38):
So they send him out on anothertrip, and this time Grant says,
all right, I'm not going veryfar.
I'll go to Cuba and I'll go toMexico.
because he wants to show hiswife 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 toGalveston.
So they take off from Vera Cruzalmost, uh, their ship almost
(50:59):
goes down in a horrible storm.
But they arrive here, here inGalveston, March of 1880 and
Grant arrives as the biggestcelebrity that ever hit Texas.
And I, I would say he's probablythe biggest celebrity who's ever
hit Texas up to this point.
I mean, we've this guy, it waslike, be like the Pope and Elvis
Presley showed up on the sameday.
This, this is big time.
(51:21):
Fame, and nobody in Galvestonhad ever seen him in person.
Everybody wanted to see him.
People were on the roofs to seehim.
Huge parade takes him over tothe Tremont Hotel.
And we have probably the mostfamous social event in Galveston
history in the the Tremonthouse, uh, ballroom on that one
night, he'll spend about a weekin Texas and leave.
(51:42):
But the interesting thing isGrant comes to Texas in 1880.
Now remember, 1865 is the end ofthe war.
Texas is a heavily confederatestate.
You would have thought thatpeople in Texas, these
ex-confederates would hate him.
Right?
That's what I thought cominginto the research.
No, they love Grant.
(52:03):
Everybody waits in line to shakehis hand.
He's a big celebrity.
Everybody loves him.
Partly because, again, the wayhe treated Robert E.
Lee at the end of the war.
Uh, he could have made thingsreally difficult for Lee and his
army in terms of thesurrendered, but he had been
generous in the terms heoffered.
And even after the war when,when, uh, forces up North wanted
(52:25):
to indict Lee for treason and,and basically put him and the
other people in prison, grantstood up and said, I will not
stand for this.
I gave this man my word that hewould be not molested in terms
of the surrender and stood upfor 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
(52:49):
thing that ever happened in the,in the 19th century in
Galveston.
J.R. (52:54):
All right.
So we have just a few minutesleft, about eight minutes left.
I'm gonna open it up to Q and Afrom anyone here.
Does anyone have any questions?
Ruth (53:04):
I have one.
This is about Galveston.
During that blockade because myfamily was here.
My great-aunt was born in 1861.
So that meant she was just aninfant.
And my grandfather was three orfour.
So I just wondered, what, whatwould the effect on people that
were here?
Ed Cotham (53:19):
Well, to begin with, there weren't very many people
here because very early in thewar, once they figured out that,
uh, the, the union ships couldbombard the city at any time,
and they did have one of thosebombardments in 1861, uh, most
of the, the residents leftexcept the ones that were real,
uh, union supporters, most ofthem left.
So, for example, the, uh, theGalveston newspaper was printed
(53:42):
in Houston for the entireremainder of the war, even
though it said the Galvestonnews, it's printed in Houston,
and there are very few peoplehere in 1862 until, until
Galveston is recapture.
And so when Galveston isrecaptured, you know, there's
this question about, well, isthis gonna last or not?
And they manage to kind of, Uh,you know, last long enough to
(54:04):
build the fortifications aroundthe city, then you do start to
get some people coming back intothe city.
But it's not like it was beforethe war, or like, it's gonna be
at the end of the war, not thatkind of population.
And the people that do comeback, uh, have a very difficult
time because you can't, youdon't have, uh, you know, the
shops are not really open toservice anything.
(54:25):
You can't do the kind of thingsyou would've normally done.
You know, galveston's big thingwas, was shipping and, and
working on, on ships, things todo with, with vessels,
transactions.
You can't do any of that.
So it doesn't really work outvery well for these people.
And the crime is terrible.
At one point in 1864, uh, theConfederate Signal Corps officer
(54:48):
comes down from the, uh,building where the Mod Coffee
House is today, and he justwalks out the door and he's,
he's robbed, uh, by a guy with agun and he's shot in the leg.
And they take off with, uh,$200of money.
And, uh, uh, Lindsay, who's thelieutenant Lindsay, who's the
name of the signal corps guy,says that the only thing that
(55:08):
that made him feel better aboutthat loss was that the money was
completely worthless about ayear later.
Oh my.
J.R. (55:17):
Anything else?
Ethan (55:18):
Have you heard accounts of people finding cannonballs in
their houses or in their yards?
Is there truth that there wouldbe cannonballs from the battle
that they were found afterwards?
and if so, was it a danger?
Ed Cotham (55:28):
Yes.
There, there, there have beeniron found all over the island
from the, not only the battle ofGalveston, but there were
several bombardments, both fromthe Gulf and from inside the
harbor that would've left alarge quantity of iron there.
And, and we have, we have someexamples here in the museum.
I mean, the museum on the thirdfloor, for example, of some iron
that hit the Hendley building.
(55:48):
But there's, there's a, a, astructure.
I know that there's a housecalled the, the, uh, Grover
house over on, on Market Streetthat still stands there today.
And I remember reading theaccount of a guy who was, was a
child in that house in, in the18, late 18 hundreds.
And he said whenever they neededfishing weights, they would just
go over to the back of thathouse and you could find iron
(56:09):
sitting all over the placethere.
But there, there are some actualexamples of people finding
shells on, uh, Galveston anddigging'em up.
And we have one account where,where a young boy was actually
trying to open one of them upand see what it was in it, and
it exploded, killed him.
So, uh, that kind of put akibosh on that, but, You know,
(56:31):
again, we, we, we did theexcavation on a war ship called
the Westfield, which was foundin Galveston Bay and, and
excavated that.
But when we did that, we foundhuge quantities of, uh, civil
War ordinance that had to be,uh, basically the, you know, the
Marine Corps to come in and, anddrill and, and safely remove the
powder from that to make itsafe.
J.R. (56:53):
Um,
Henry (56:54):
What consequences did Houston's anti secessionist
states have on him politicallyand personally?
Ed Cotham (56:59):
Well, that, and that's an interesting subject
because if you go to, uh, it's Ithink the corner of 22nd and
post office, that's where theold, uh, Tremont Hotel used to
be.
I guess it's 23rd and postoffice, that's the old Tremont
Hotel.
It's also a parking lot today.
That was the first one, and.
Houston came in 1861 and wasdetermined to give a speech to
(57:21):
the people of Galveston aboutwhy he did not support secessiom
and had his position on it.
And this was put in the paperthat 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 killyou.
And, and Houston said, I'm gonnado it.
And rode over here at that time,because there wasn't, wasn't
(57:41):
actually a, a road over here.
Got over here, went over to the,the, uh, balcony of the Tremont
Hotel and was getting ready togo 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 theold traitor, which, you know,
wouldn't encourage me to speakvery well.
I don't know about you, butHouston went up there and
(58:03):
delivered about a 30 minutespeech, which is transcribed and
we have copies of, it's a, it'sa beautiful speech.
And what he said was this, Hesaid, uh, you may win Southern
May, independence for the South,but I doubt it.
And he said, you, when you lookat all the resources that are
aligned against you, you don'thave the resources to compete
with these people.
But he said, you've made yourdecision.
(58:25):
I stand with Texas and I'm goingto to support the state.
And of course, his son, uh,would actually serve in the
Confederate army.
And, uh, although Houston wasagain, had opposed a session,
uh, when he had been offered theopportunity by Abraham Lincoln
to get the support of federaltroops to try and stay in
(58:46):
office, Houston had turned thatdown.
And so I think that probablydiminished his reputation
shortly there, uh, among Texans.
But in the long term, I don'tknow that it had any, any
perceptible, uh, effect on hisreputation.
J.R. (59:02):
Everyone, thank you so much for joining us this evening
for Galveston Unscripted at theRosenberg Library.
This episode comes from theRosenberg Library Conversation
series where I sat down with afew historians to talk about
some extremely interestinghistorical facts about Galveston
and Texas history.
I would like to personally thankthe Rosenberg Library for
(59:23):
allowing Galveston Unscripted tohold live podcast conversations
in the library.
J.R. (2) (59:29):
If this is your first time listening to Galveston
Unscripted, be sure to subscribeto the podcast.
If you've listened or watchedbefore and you enjoy the content
we are putting out in audio andvideo, please make sure to like,
subscribe and review thepodcast.
Leave us a review, leave us arating.
It really helps other peoplefind what we are doing here at
(59:49):
Galveston Unscripted.
Your rating and review helpsother people find Galveston
Unscripted and discover theamazing history of our little
island.
And be sure to follow us onFacebook, Instagram, TikTok, all
those social media platforms.
J.R. (01:00:03):
When I drive through Port Lavaca today, the last thing I
think of is submarine building.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.