In Sugar Land, just southwest of Houston, another self-taught historian, Reginald Moore, is fighting for a memorial to mark the mass graves that resulted from convict leasing, a system of de facto slavery that postdated the legal end of slavery in Texas. In Slocum, an hour west of Nacogdoches, where as many as two hundred African Americans were killed in a fit of genocidal violence in 1910, descendants are struggling to find long-ignored mass graves with an assist from self-taught historian E. R. McCaslin revived interest in the Great Hanging at Gainesville, the killing and mass burial of dozens of accused Unionists seventy miles north of Dallas in 1862 that was long celebrated by some locals as a great victory. (It is perhaps telling that 1846, the year that Texas entered the Union, does not loom so large.) Even today, the lowest insult one Texas politician can hurl at another is to compare him to Moses Rose, the man who left the Alamo before the fighting started-a slur that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick directed at House Speaker Joe Straus, a fellow Republican, in 2017.Ī 1994 book by University of North Texas professor Richard B. But many Texans’ knowledge of the state’s past is focused on what happened during six months in 1836, when the Texas Revolution was fought, and what occurred between 18, when we tried to extricate ourselves from the Union. “We don’t have as many heroes as we used to,” said John McCammon, who testified on behalf of “myself and my Confederate ancestors.” Rudy Ray, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said Hale’s bill threatened to do “great damage to our heritage.”īut whose heritage is “our heritage,” exactly? Texans have a much stronger sense of their history than the citizens of any other state, and that shared vocabulary seeps into our public life. Testifying against the bill was a long succession of older men and women, some of whom called the boy deluded and naive. Broadening the scope of the holiday would make it “a more accurate symbol of our state’s diverse history.”
“Many Texans were also killed for allegedly having pro-Union sentiments,” Hale said, noting that Confederate soldiers weren’t the only people who should be remembered. Young Hale, testifying at a House committee meeting, explained in his prepared remarks that he didn’t want to erase the holiday he wanted to change its name to “Civil War Remembrance Day” and move the date so that future overlaps could be avoided. That year, as sometimes happens, it fell on Martin Luther King Jr. A thirteen-year-old middle school student from Austin named Jacob Hale was defending a bill, drafted by him and given to his state representative, that would correct what he regarded as a grievous mistake: The state of Texas celebrates a holiday called Confederate Heroes Day, on January 19, Lee’s birthday. Lee surrendered to the Union Army at a courthouse in Virginia, an unusual spectacle took place in a committee room inside the Texas Capitol, the grounds of which are adorned with towering monuments and paeans to the slave empire’s army. On the mild, cloudy day of April 14, 2015, exactly 150 years and five days after Confederate general Robert E. This article is part of our October 2019 cover package on the battle to rewrite Texas history.