German-Texans Against Slavery: The Comfort Manifesto and the Nueces Massacre

A monument stands in a small town called Comfort, Texas, about forty miles northwest of San Antonio. It is called the Treue der Union, which is German for loyalty to the Union. It was erected in eighteen sixty-six by the families of men who were killed in August of eighteen sixty-two. It is one of only two Confederate-era monuments in the American South dedicated not to Confederate soldiers but to men who died fighting against the Confederacy.

The story behind it begins in the eighteen forties, when a German joint-stock colonization company called the Adelsverein Society brought approximately seven thousand German immigrants to the Texas Hill Country between eighteen forty-two and eighteen fifty-three. Fredericksburg was founded by these settlers in eighteen forty-six. Many of the immigrants were Forty-Eighters, political refugees who had fled the failed European revolutions of eighteen forty-eight carrying republican and abolitionist convictions. In eighteen fifty-four, German settlers in the Hill Country signed the Comfort Manifesto, explicitly opposing both slavery and secession. This was not a popular position in a state that held over one hundred eighty thousand enslaved people.

When Texas voted to secede in eighteen sixty-one, many Hill Country Germans refused to support the Confederacy. Some attempted to flee to Mexico rather than serve in the Confederate Army.

On August tenth, eighteen sixty-two, Confederate forces caught sixty-five of those men at the Nueces River, ninety miles southwest of San Antonio. Nineteen were killed in the initial ambush. Nine more who had been wounded and captured were executed afterward. Most of the survivors made it to Mexico, though Confederate troops pursued and killed several more of the fleeing men before they could cross.

The monument in Comfort stands on the spot where the dead were eventually brought back and buried. It reads, in German, in memory of those who died true to the Union. The Lost Cause narrative that would come to dominate Southern memory for the next century had no room for this story.