Cotton, Slavery, and the Texas That Seceded

By eighteen sixty, Texas was one of the fastest-growing cotton states in the American South. The number of enslaved people in Texas had grown from under thirty thousand at statehood to over one hundred eighty thousand in fifteen years, roughly a five-hundred-percent increase driven by planters from the older Southern states who arrived with both land hunger and human property. The plantation belt ran across East Texas and into the Brazos River valley, and by eighteen sixty the enslaved population made up thirty percent of the state's total.

When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency that November without appearing on the Texas ballot, a secessionist movement that had been building for a decade accelerated to a conclusion. A state convention voted one hundred sixty-six to eight for secession on February first, eighteen sixty-one. Governor Sam Houston, who had led Texas to independence and served as its first president, refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.

He was removed from office in March. Houston, who was sixty-eight years old, retired to his home in Huntsville and died two years later. Texas contributed roughly ninety thousand soldiers to the Confederacy and was one of the last Confederate states to see significant Union military action.

The war ended formally in April eighteen sixty-five, but news traveled slowly across the vast Texas frontier. It was not until June nineteenth of that year that Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and read General Order Number Three, announcing that enslaved people in Texas were free. That date became the holiday now known as Juneteenth.

The full story of that day is told in its own track. The cotton economy that had driven secession did not disappear after the war. It adapted, drawing on sharecropping and tenant farming to maintain many of the same labor relationships under different legal terms.

That transition shaped Texas society well into the twentieth century.