Taken from
http://www.hal-pc.org/~dcrane/txgenweb/nueces.htm
The Nueces Massacre, also known as the Battle of the Nueces.
Contributed by Robert G. Schulz, Jr.
The following is a long excerpt from my own family history, from a chapter entitled, "The Germans: Geh Mit Ins Texas." It concerns the Nueces Massacre.
The critical issue of the Civil War that finally split Germans and Anglos into literally-warring factions was military conscription – again, the very reason many Germans had fled their homelands to come to Texas. In April, 1862, at no less than Gen. Robert E. Lee's urging, the Southern states ratified the Confederate Conscription Law, which stated that all males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five were required to volunteer for, pledge allegiance to, and serve in, the Confederate States Army. In 1863 the law was abridged to broaden the age liability limits to seventeen and fifty. The law was unpopular in all Southern states; it was particularly repugnant in Texas because, first, all men who really wanted to fight had already volunteered and, most critically, it left little or no manpower to defend the long frontier against the ever-raiding Comanches, Kiowas, Jicarillas, and, in the Pecos and Rio Grande regions, the Mescalero Apaches. Texans protested loudly and militantly so, in May, 1862, Gen. Paul Octave Hebert, commander of the Confederacy's Military Department of Texas, put the entire state under martial law and appointed provost marshals to administer conscription. The administration of the law became "ruthless," and the power of the provosts was soon expanded to include confiscation of personal property deemed necessary for the welfare of the Confederate States. Such personal property, it became evident, included wagons, oxen, mules, and horses being used for private transport of cotton to the Mexican ports. In Fredericksburg, popular resident Jacob Kuechler was appointed by the Confederacy to serve as "enrollment officer" for the Confederate Army, which apparently placed him in league with the provosts and in opposition of the same immigrants with which he'd shared life and death experiences on the trek up from Indian Point. Along the border, Dr. John "Rip" Ford, former Texas Indian fighter, Texas Ranger, battle surgeon, hero of the Mexican War, Texas politician, and now a colonel in the Confederate Army, was spat upon and cursed by his friends and neighbors because he found it necessary to commandeer their feed grains for his own cavalry mounts.
Now the protests by neutral, pro-Unionists, and even offended property owners grew ugly and even violent – with the Hill Country Germans being the most vocal. In June, 1861, key officials in Gillespie County – the mayor and sheriff of Fredericksburg, the city's leading grocer and butcher, and Confederate enrollment officer Kuechler among them – secretly organized as the Union Loyal League. Some sources defend the league's mission as one of maintaining a balance between pro- and anti-Union sentiments, but the League's real purpose was to thwart Confederate conscription and attempt to maintain Union loyalty within the Hill Country German communities. Letters intercepted by Confederate troops allegedly connected the Union Loyal League to leading Southern unionists A.J. Hamilton, who would govern Texas under a military regime as post-Civil-War Reconstruction was invoked, and E.J. Davis, who would be the last of Texas' Reconstructionist governors. In response, Gen. H.P. Bee, commander of all Confederate forces in South Texas, declared Gillespie, Kerr, Kendall, Medina, and Bexar Counties – where the German protests were the strongest – to be "in open rebellion" and, in effect, declared war on them. Fredericksburg was actually occupied by Confederate troops under Capt. James Duff, a gruff, brooding Scotsman who had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army. Duff declared himself provost, then stated in a letter, "The God **** Dutchmen are Unionists to a man…I will hang all I suspect of being anti-Confederates." Hangings were, in fact, frequent. Letters from German residents of Fredericksburg attest that many of them would leave their homes at sundown and hide in the surrounding woods in fear of raiding Anglo "guerrillas," or Hangebund (or Die Haengerbaende -- "the hanging band"), who rode up in the night, snatched young men from their beds, hanged their parents, and burned their homes for avoiding conscription. Persecution of neutral and pro-Union Germans drove hundreds from their homes – some, all the way to Union states, Mexico, or even back to Germany. The Latin Colony at Sisterdale disintegrated; many of Comfort's "Free Thinkers," and the remainder of "The Forty," left Texas for good for states west and north.
But one act of persecution and vengeance against the German residents – or, depending on your point of view, an appropriate response to "treason" -- stands out above all others and, in the small German communities of the Hill Country, is memorialized to this day. The facts of the matter were still being hotly debated as late as March, 1997, at a conference in Fredericksburg entitled "Nueces Encounter 1862: Battle or Massacre?". The latest findings were reported in the October, 1997 issue of Texas Monthly magazine, in an article by Helen Thorpe, "Historical Friction." The following summary includes those latest findings as reported by Ms. Thorpe but is compiled from a number of sources.
By the summer of 1862, the Union Loyal League, under Kuechler's guidance, had actually raised three companies of supposed Confederate volunteers – about five hundred men – but, through bureaucratic maneuvering and stone walling, had managed to keep the companies in Texas, ostensible as "home guard" units. Duff sniffed out the ruse and warned the Fredericksburg mayor and sheriff, the key personnel of the Union Loyal League, that he was about to appoint his own slate of municipal officers. Instead, he arrested the League's key officials and had them thrown into an army jail in San Antonio. Kuechler barely avoided arrest but immediately disbanded the three Confederate companies and got word to the ranks that all persons wanting to make a run for Mexico to escape further conscription should gather at Turtle Creek in Kerr County (about fifteen miles west of Kerrville). On August 1, 1862, sixty-eight men – sixty-three Germans, one Mexican, and four Anglos – heeded the call and gathered at the appointed place and time. The group comprised mostly older men and a few young boys from Mason, Kendall, Kerr, and Gillespie Counties, but all of them were targeted conscripts. They elected a Fritz Tegener (some sources refer to him as "Maj. Tegener") as their commander; serving as Tegener's second-in-command was his Fredericksburg neighbor, Henry Joseph Schwethelm, who later documented his account of the whole episode. Kuechler also joined the company. Some sources argue that the group's aim was just to get to Mexico, to avoid conscription and fighting altogether. One branch of thought rather weakly contends the Germans were legally acting in response to an act the new Confederate government of Texas had passed in 1861, immediately after secession from the Union, granting a thirty-day period of "immunity" to all Union sympathizers who wished to take their possessions and leave Texas (Obviously, by 1862 the "immune" period had long since expired, and the argument that news of the act had just reached the back hollows of the Hill Country does not stand up to the speed with which other "news" from the State Capital reached even the most remote farms.). Still other sources maintain the group intended to reach the mouth of the Rio Grande and join the Union detachments enforcing the blockade (A goodly portion of the Union Army's First Texas Rifles stationed at Brownsville were Texas Germans and holdovers from the group of five hundred young men who volunteered off the beach at Indian Point for service in the Mexican War.). One source strongly argues that the men were "…part of the armed resistance (emphasis is ours) in the Hill Country." At least one member of the group was an avowed Union sympathizer and had clearly stated his intent to join the Union Army, and one historian claims the group actually named itself "The Comfort Company of the Union Army." Several sources claim that the group was only lightly armed and that some individuals were unarmed; however, the best-documented reports state that the Germans were well-armed, with both rifles and six-shooters. The Germans did, in fact, proceed to the southwest at a lazy, almost insolent pace, stopping often to hunt game and search out wild honey. In his writings, Schwethelm claims he raged at Tegener to speed the pace, but Tegener was convinced that there would be no pursuit. Tegener may have been correct, except that, as the Unionist force reached a crossing of the Guadalupe River, they encountered a recently-arrived German immigrant, Charles Bergmann, and "relieved" him of his supplies. Bergmann, angered at his turn of fortune, rode this way and that until he found a small Confederate detachment. Bergmann was either detained by the Confederates, or decided to cooperate with them. In any case, he reported that a force of German Unionists headed for Mexico had robbed him.
Bringing the