WI: Sam Houston accepts Lincoln's offer of 50,000 troops and a position as commander in the army?

So, Lincoln supposedly sent Sam Houston a letter offering him 50,000 troops and a position commanding the Texas branch of union forces. Supposedly, Houston mulled over the letter all night long and received counsel from friends before burning the letter. What if he had accepted Lincoln's offer? How quickly would Sam Houston be able to bring Texas secessionist forces to heel? What impact does this have on the rest of the Civil War?
 
I can't comment on how this would affect the war effort, but I can comment on the historical and cultural implications.

Sam Houston was forced out of office as the Governor of Texas by the secessionists, and him fighting them with 50,000 men at his back could force make Texas its own front in the war and have fascinating results. For one, I guess that means he has a change of heart and is more worried about the damage the Confederates can do to Texas rather than what fighting over the state would do to it.

Sam Houston would be a more controversial figure in the memory of Texans, whether he wins or loses. His opposition to secession being exemplified in him actively fighting against it would make a strong lasting impact on the state.
 
I can't comment on how this would affect the war effort, but I can comment on the historical and cultural implications.

Sam Houston was forced out of office as the Governor of Texas by the secessionists, and him fighting them with 50,000 men at his back could force make Texas its own front in the war and have fascinating results. For one, I guess that means he has a change of heart and is more worried about the damage the Confederates can do to Texas rather than what fighting over the state would do to it.

Sam Houston would be a more controversial figure in the memory of Texans, whether he wins or loses. His opposition to secession being exemplified in him actively fighting against it would make a strong lasting impact on the state.

I can comment of its effect on the rest of the war. Quite a few Texans were sent out of Texas to fight in the war. There were Texan units fighting under Lee. If Texas is having a civil war of its own they won't be sent. That is going to weaken the CSA's other armies considerably.
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
One group that would back Houston was the German/Czech people in Central Texas. They did not leave Europe to fight for slavery.

Indeed, Texas was quite divided.

But was anti-Secessionist sentiment concentrated in a particular geographical location? Preferably along the border with the Union or on the coast.
 
Here is what i found at the following website.

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/6-unionist-strongholds-in-the-south-during-the-civil-war

Texas Hill Country

Texas only supplied roughly 2,000 troops to the North compared to more than 70,000 for the Confederacy, yet historians estimate that as many as a third of its citizens continued to support the Unites States after secession. This region of south central Texas was home to some of the Lone Star State’s most hardline Unionists. Its residents included a large contingent of German immigrants, many of them liberal intellectuals who had fled their home country after a failed revolution in 1848. The German transplants typically considered slavery immoral, and many refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy or join its army. The Hill Country’s resistance put a strain on its relationship with its Confederate neighbors, leading to acts of brutal violence on both sides. The most notorious incident came in August 1862, when around 65 German Unionists tried to flee Texas for Mexico, where they planned to sail for U.S.-held New Orleans. When they stopped to camp along the Nueces River, the Unionists fell under ambush by around 100 Confederate cavalrymen. Nineteen Germans were killed in the initial attack, and several others were later executed as traitors to the Southern cause.
 
Sam Houston was a very important politician in Tennessee too, but I don't know how much pull he'd have in the 1860s compared to earlier. Not as much as he'd like, I'm sure.

But Lincoln is offering the men... I'm sure Sam Houston can get 13,000 of his own (instead of the pitiful 2,000 we get without a unifiying figure) and combine them with Lincoln's offer and set up some forts on the Texan coast.
 
Indeed, Texas was quite divided.

But was anti-Secessionist sentiment concentrated in a particular geographical location? Preferably along the border with the Union or on the coast.

I know very little about Texan politics at that time, but I do know that its population and its slave-owning population were concentrated in the eastern part of the state at that time (the part that borders the rest of the CSA).

Perhaps if Houston ends up mostly winning on that front, it becomes a stalemate right around there until Lee surrenders.

Here is what i found at the following website.

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/6-unionist-strongholds-in-the-south-during-the-civil-war

Texas Hill Country

Texas only supplied roughly 2,000 troops to the North compared to more than 70,000 for the Confederacy, yet historians estimate that as many as a third of its citizens continued to support the Unites States after secession. This region of south central Texas was home to some of the Lone Star State’s most hardline Unionists. Its residents included a large contingent of German immigrants, many of them liberal intellectuals who had fled their home country after a failed revolution in 1848. The German transplants typically considered slavery immoral, and many refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy or join its army. The Hill Country’s resistance put a strain on its relationship with its Confederate neighbors, leading to acts of brutal violence on both sides. The most notorious incident came in August 1862, when around 65 German Unionists tried to flee Texas for Mexico, where they planned to sail for U.S.-held New Orleans. When they stopped to camp along the Nueces River, the Unionists fell under ambush by around 100 Confederate cavalrymen. Nineteen Germans were killed in the initial attack, and several others were later executed as traitors to the Southern cause.

Ok, I'm trying to map this out as a story in my head.

Houston agrees to take up arms for the Union, claiming that he is still the legitimate Governor of Texas, and is able to raise a number of troops while receiving more from Lincoln.

Maybe a first confrontation with a Confederate army breaks his initial army (with many of them drawing from populations of being German intellectuals, that's not that far fetched) and he has to flee to lands near the Mexican border to recover.

From there, over the course of the next two years, he goes from having a few thousand anti-secessionist raw recruits made up of new immigrants to having a solidly built army as he pushes through to central Texas, securing more of the state all the time.

By 1865, he hits a stalemate outside of the City of Tyler, unable to push any further while keeping the rest of the state under Union control.
 
But Lincoln is offering the men... I'm sure Sam Houston can get 13,000 of his own (instead of the pitiful 2,000 we get without a unifiying figure) and combine them with Lincoln's offer and set up some forts on the Texan coast.

For Tennessee, most Tennesseans would think he's a has been who's sold out into being what the Feds want. If he weren't, he would've have gone to Texas to begin with. The Unionists in Tennessee wouldn't take up arms just because of him.

Tennessee might as well be ruled out as a source for soldiers for this, unless other Union soldiers are there to quickly occupy Tennessee and depose the Confederate government (quite some butterflies). East Tennessee's government shouldn't just be East Tennessee, but all of Tennessee, by this logic. Quite a difficult scenario for the Union to enforce. Although an old Sam Harris as military governor of Tennessee might be interesting, and having him instead of Andrew Johnson or Parson Brownlow as Tennessee's governor would be cool. Although I don't see why Sam Harris would go back to Tennessee, just that he'd be an obvious choice as governor if he did.
 
Look, someone asked where Lincoln got the troops to offer. Tennessee had a good unionist minority (that admittedly went off and done their own thing most of the time instead of coordinate with the feds or even each other). If these guys won't follow Houston, Lincoln can just send HIS guys to Texas (after all, Tennessee was mostly in union hands by early 1862, with Nashville and most of the rural areas in North control, Chattanooga and a few holdouts in Southern control)
 
The thing that most posts like this suffer from is logistics, logistics, logistics.

Sure, Lincoln offered 50,000 troops. It's incredibly salient to ask, Where are they coming from? When Lincoln made the offer, he offered what he didn't have. Both Lincoln and Houston knew this. But for the sake of the OP, let's say that Lincoln takes Houston up on it. Cool. That doesn't happen in a vacuum. Throughout 1860 and 1861 various militia companies had formed (and were continuing to form) for service in the Confederate army.

Back to the question at hand. Houston accepts the offer from Lincoln. Given that other than Houston, the entire state government was mostly secessionists, the next thing is he gets deposed. Now, I can't tell you whether the secessionists would simply put him under house arrest or if they would go further than that.

So, it's the beginning of March, Houston is gone as Governor, Edward Clark, is now Governor. General Twiggs surrendered the all of the Federal property in Texas on February two weeks earlier, in the last days of the Buchanan presidency. Texas' military forces are mobilizing.

What are the Federal amphibious abilities in April and May of 1861? I'm not sure but safe to say, minimal. 50,000 is a pipe dream. Maybe 2 or 3,000 men could be landed at Galveston, and that would come at a trade off. And for what? Assume that Lincoln is able to muster a brigade of infantry and marines, and lands them in Galveston or on the mainland of the Texas coast in May or June 1861. They could conceivably deny the Confederacy the port of Galveston throughout the war. That's actually a very likely outcome of any attempt by Lincoln to prop up Houston. And that's not exactly a small victory in and of itself.

But on the mainland of Texas, whatever forces Lincoln could assemble would be a tiny fraction of the 50,000 promised troops. And generals like McCulloch would very likely have tactical superiority. For what it's worth, I think Lincoln would know this and would likely not act on his promise, at least by sea in the first year of the war.

I can hear someone else saying, well he could send them down from the north. See my first sentence. Logistics makes that highly unlikely. There's no viable railroads between St. Louis in Missouri and Texas. Not of any length that would be valuable for transport or supplies. They would need to cover 650 miles, over land through hostile terrain. Now 50,000 troops could likely do it, but where is Lincoln going to find 50,000 that he can afford to send gallivanting half way across the continent? What about a smaller number? In 1861 there's simply not a lot of options. I would argue even an entire Union army corps (20,000+ men) going from Saint Louis would likely find that even if the Confederate Department of the Transmississippi wasn't able to muster enough men in one place to stop them (not a sure thing), it would take half the fighting force of the Feds to hold their supply lines, otherwise, they'd been at the end of a very long tether without supplies.

Ok, what about all the Germans and Poles in Texas who opposed secession. After all, 25% of the state voted against secession. That's actually a very good question to ask, IMO. After all, 2,000 (mostly foreign born) Texans served in the Federal army. There are two things that work against this number growing to 5 or 10,000. First, while many Germans were unionists, and a few served in the Union, a few more tried and were hanged for treason by the Texas government. More than that, just because people were ardent unionists, does not follow that they will march off to war against their neighbors. Houston's deposed. Any attempt by Lincoln to relieve him by sea is simply too small in the first year of the war to be particularly successful, just a few thousand at most. Same for an overland route. A few who want adventure will take the risk, but for the vast majority of family men, the risk simply outweighs the reward.

Now, if Lincoln makes an effort, while I think it would come too late to affect the first year of the war in Texas, it will have serious repercussions in that the Confederate army of the Tennessee will have even greater manpower shortages, because Lubbock (governor in Texas from the end of 1861 to 1863) will fight tooth and nail to keep more of the 70,000+ Texans who served in the Confederate army home to oppose invasion efforts. So, and this is really playing fast and loose, if there were substantially fewer Confederates in the Western Theater (Tennessee and deep south) then the war could go South (sorry for the pun) for the south much sooner, and result in the Union cutting the south in two even earlier than happened IOTL. So, even though I think Lincoln's offer was not capable of propping up Houston or keeping Texas in the Union in 1861 or even 1862, it could potentially shorten the war by keeping tens of thousands of fighting men close to a thousand miles west of the main theaters of conflict.

Now before anyone comes in here channeling the ghost of TFSmith, keep in mind, we're talking about the facts and circumstances that existed in 1861, not 1865.
 
50,000 is NOT a pipe dream. We can free up that many men by April 1862 when a Northern government in Tennessee is established and it's mostly under union control (OK, Chattanooga isn't)
 
Don't forget the Tejanos

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About 2500 served in the Confederate army.

Here's a balanced article from Texas Almanac that showcases both sides of the conflict among Tejanos:
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pom02
 
But my California approved textbook said that less than 100 Tejanos took up a rifle or hauled an artillery piece for the South.
 
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