A better life in Texas: refugees of the Confederacy

Hopkins County History

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series on the historic landmarks and homes that make Hopkins County a culturally rich place to live.

Five miles out of town at the roadside park on State Highway 19 north, a historical marker erected in 1965 marks the spot where the Stone family of Louisiana took refuge when they fled the economic hardship and turmoil of the Deep South to the relative safety of Texas during the Civil War. Although the war lasted from 1861 to 1865, Texas found itself torn economically and ideologically for much longer.

The marker reads: “The Civil War refugees family of Mrs. Amanda Stone was shown great kindness when rescued by Hopkins County people after a roadside accident that happened here. The Stones saw the Texans share what little they had, even to cooking the last old farm hen to feed them.”

Back as early as the start of the war, according to Hopkins County Historian June Tuck, the newly formed Confederacy had begun to levy taxes and control commodities to fund the wartime economy. Goods were bought specifically by the county government out of Huntsville, Texas, according to Tuck, and resold to local families for a slightly higher price.

This seemed to have kept local economies afloat, according to Tuck. Without this commerce, “many families would have had to do without,” she wrote. Trade routes from the North were cut off. One Hopkins County trader who had gone to Michigan to buy furniture-making supplies wrote home that he wished he had traveled to Saint Louis instead, as all his supplies were confiscated at the union blockade.

Prices for goods were set by the state commissioner and were not to exceed a certain rate. However, the county commissioners court had to post notices specifically to cotton growers to sell to them, as some farmers were distrustful of Confederate money. In some cases, the commissioners court directly made transactions, in one case buying 300 bales of cotton and giving it to the wives of Confederate soldiers. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Hopkins County residents who helped the Stones may have had to cook their last farm hen to eat.

“The Stones were one of many families to flee from war lines to the safety of Texas. Here, even though federal invasion repeatedly threatened, only a few coastal towns were under fire from the enemy,” the marker’s inscription reads.

In fact, letters from the front of many Hopkins County boys and men who had formed up regiments showed that the did not stay close to home to fight. They went to Fredericksburg and Little Rock, but almost no documents that remain today that place Hopkins County detachments within the state of Texas. Those that did stay concerned themselves with skirmishes with Comanche and Kiowa indigenous peoples rather than fighting union soldiers, according to a series of letters.

For this reason, those in the deep South may have viewed Texas as a safer place to seek refuge. In fact, the Oakland Cumberland Presbyterian Church located on County Road 2653 between State Highway 11 and County Road 4738 is the establishment of Willis and Nannie Stewart, who migrated to the area from Rising Star, Alabama when their original church was burned during the reconstruction era.

Possibly a famous pair of Hopkins County confederate refugees are the James brothers, Jesse and Frank. Originally of Missouri, the brothers either moved to or frequently visited Sulphur Springs during the reconstruction era according to a Jan. 8, 1937 article in the News-Telegram. The famous outlaw’s cousin, George James, operated a livery stable across from the Hopkins County Echo office, the News-Telegram reported, and the brothers often came to visit friends and family while on the lam back in Missouri.

According to reports at the time (and possibly to the self-narrative of the infamous gunslingers) Jesse James and his posse sought vengeance for the Yankees who had mistreated them during the Civil War, and in so doing robbed and plundered northern-owned farms.

According to the 1937 article, however, the James brothers “never strayed from the straight and narrow while using Sulphur Springs as a haven” and described them as peaceful and likeable.

“Like most refugees, the Stones, when they visited in Hopkins County, were heartbroken over the loss of their old home to the enemy. In Texas they endured poverty, loneliness and sorrow at the deaths of two sons lost in the war. They had to lease farmland to support the family and 90 slaves dependent upon them,” the marker reads.

The biggest question surrounding the Civil War is the question that started it: that “all persons held as slaves within any State… shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” according to the Emancipation Proclamation. An 1864 tax roll of Hopkins County showed that the value of a slave was approximately $700 to $1,200 each, so the Stone family was hardly destitute if they had 90 slaves—a value upwards of $63,000 in those days, which is approximately $1.8 million today.

“Money was easily obtained when one could put a slave up for collateral,” Tuck writes. A large slave holder would rent out his slaves to a farmer who was unable to buy slaves. But even if the Stones could have leased out their slaves for Confederate dollars, it doesn’t mean they could have obtained other commodities, especially if other goods, such as cotton or corn, were scarce.

The slave trade was booming in Hopkins County during the Civil War, as many “felt it was safer to have their slaves in Texas” due to the fact that Texas was far away from major battles of the war, Tuck writes. Hopkins County slaveholders often had more money tied up in slaves than they did in land, Tuck writes. From 1860 to 1864 Hopkins County went from 211 families who held slaves to 333 families who held slaves. Furthermore, Tuck writes, “It’s no secret that fortunes were made selling runaway slaves.”

Tuck found documents of slave traders who had come from Louisiana and Mississippi with slaves who had either run away or whose masters had been killed in the war to sell in Hopkins County. In fact, Tuck documents two cases of landowners who became refugees of the Confederacy so their slaves would not be forced to join the Union army. Dr. John T. Simmons and his 110 slaves as well as R.W. Lee and his 104 slaves both came to Hopkins County, despite having no land to work.

Although the marker on SH 19 counts a family of white refugees of the Confederacy, there is no marker for the black American refugees of the Civil War. Treated as property to be leased out for farmland or bargained with for cotton or corn, there is no real accounting of the actual numbers of black Americans who were transported across the south.

Tuck gives us a glimpse of how slaves were secreted away in Texas to protect the status of ownership.

“During the war, slaves remained for the most part, faithful to their masters,” she writes. “Of course, county patrols played an important part in their actions.”

One account by Julius Connor lived on in historical memory. A party of a confederate agent accompanied by two slaves, one a young boy and the other an old man, traveled through Saltillo and camped near White Oak Creek. The slaves attempted to escape by hitting the soldier over the head with an axe, murdering him and hiding his body under a bridge on the creek. Eventually, they were captured, and attendance at their lynching was required for all slaves from miles around. One slave girl fainted.

“Their young boys, at one time, carried pistols for safety when school mates resented their strange manners. Yet eventually they and most other refugees were grateful to Texas for its many generosities.”

Although Tuck wrote that Texas did not recover, at least economically for approximately five years after the war, the stories of those hard times remained in the memories of all who lived through it. Those who came here as refugees—black and white, carpetbagger and confederate—came to love their new home and embrace the values unique to Texas, which no other place has or will have.