During the Civil War, enslaved people were driven like cattle into Texas by slaveholders who were fleeing Union forces in other states.
It was called “refugeeing” slaves. The euphemism meant that when your humanity had eroded to the point that you could treat other human beings as property, rather than people, you would think that it’s only business to drive people across borders to protect your investment.
Some of the slave owners who were moving to Texas thought that, even if the South lost the war, Texas would become an independent republic again, rather than rejoin the Union.
Confederate authorities estimated as many as 150,000 enslaved people arrived in Texas from other states.
Historians are debating the accuracy of those numbers. Among the reasons to doubt their accuracy is that contemporary records treated enslaved people as taxable property, rather than human beings, and some wealthy planters tried to avoid taxes. What’s beyond debate is that the number of African Americans in Texas increased dramatically during the war. The census recorded 182,566 enslaved people in 1860. More than 250,000 were freed in 1865.
Why bring up this shameful episode in Texas history?
It’s not well known, and it’s the kind of story that people across generations have conspired to keep hidden. I’m pretty sure that a history teacher could get into trouble for giving an accurate account of how it came to be that so many African Americans arrived in Texas during the last years of slavery.
• Sources: Professor Caleb McDaniel, who teaches history at Rice University and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for Sweet Taste of Liberty, has a post titled “How Many Slaves were Refugeed to Confederate Texas?” on his blog, 25 June 2013:
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