The Oath He Would Not Take

In March 1861 the man who won San Jacinto lost the Texas governorship rather than swear loyalty to the Confederacy.

By Jonah Hale

On March 16, 1861, the Texas Secession Convention declared the office of governor vacant. Sam Houston would not take its loyalty oath to the Confederate States of America. Two days later Lieutenant Governor Edward Clark took the chair. The Raven was sixty-eight, with a house full of young children, and once again he chose exile over a fight that would tear Texas apart.

He had seen this storm coming. Elected governor in 1859 after a bruising decade as a Unionist senator, Houston had opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, drawn the official condemnation of the Texas legislature, and still come home to beat Hardin Runnels. When Lincoln won the presidency, Houston called the legislature into special session and warned that civil war would end in a Northern victory and the wreck of the South. He refused to summon a secession convention himself, hoping ardor would cool.

It did not. Oran M. Roberts, John S. Ford, and others printed calls for a January convention without him. The legislature validated it. On February 1, with Houston in the chamber, the ordinance of secession passed 166 to 8. Voters ratified it on February 23 by 44,317 to 13,020. Houston acquiesced to those steps rather than spill Texas blood over them.

What he would not do was swear the new oath. When the convention reassembled in March, it required current officeholders to pledge loyalty to the Confederacy. Houston refused. He held that the convention’s acts after its February adjournment were illegal. The convention answered by emptying his office and seating Clark.

Reports later said President Lincoln twice offered federal troops to keep Houston in the Governor’s Mansion and Texas in the Union. Houston declined those, too. He would not make his state a battlefield to keep his chair.

It was not the first time he had walked away from power with the story unfinished. In April 1829, eleven weeks after marrying Eliza Allen, he had resigned the governorship of Tennessee and fled west to the Cherokees who had once named him Colonneh—the Raven—while both he and Eliza kept a lifelong silence about the rupture. In 1861 the silence was public and political. Texas left the Union. Houston left the mansion.

He moved his family to Huntsville the next year, to a rented place called the Steamboat House. On July 26, 1863, he died there of pneumonia. The battle everyone remembers is San Jacinto. The choice that ended his last office was an oath he would not speak.

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