At one of my presentations, while speaking of the high proportion of slaves present in the river parishes in northeast Louisiana, I was asked about the Texas slave population in the regions where the regiments of McCulloch’s Brigade were raised, and where the Texas Troubles had taken place.

Like the data about Louisiana that appears in my book, I rely upon the Historical Census Browser at the University of Virginia to crunch the numbers for me. After obtaining the numbers on Texas, I selected only those counties that either contributed substantial numbers of men to the four Confederate regiments present at Milliken’s Bend, or those counties which reported fires or other disturbances during the “Texas Troubles” of 1860.

Here’s what that information looks like:

COUNTY	TX TROUBLES	16th TX INF	16th TX CAV	17th TX INF	19th TX INF	% Slaves
Angelina				Y		16
Bell		Y		Y		21
Burleson				Y		35
Collin			Y			11
Colorado				Y		45
Cooke			Y			10
Dallas	Y					12
Denton	Y					5
Fayette	Y					33
Grayson			Y			16
Llano				Y		5
Marion					Y	51
Panola					Y	36
Rusk	Y				Y	39
Smith				Y		37
Titus					Y	25
Travis	Y	Y		Y		39
Upshur		Y				36
Washington		Y				52

It was interesting to me to see how many counties had a third or less of their population as enslaved persons. And yet, there are also those counties like Marion and Washington, with about half of the population being enslaved. At the other extreme, are a few counties with very few slaves.

This puzzles me, just a bit. First, I did not expect to find such a wide range in the proportion of slave population across all of these counties. I certainly did not think that a county like Dallas, that was involved in the paranoia of the Texas Troubles, would have such a very low percentage. I fully expected there to be a large proportion of slaves present in those counties which exhibited such concern and fear over slave insurrections. But that is not the case.

It would be helpful to take a look at rumored or actual slave uprisings in these counties in the decade preceding the war, outside of the Texas Troubles. Had some of these counties already experienced rebellions? Did this predispose them to the paranoia that struck during the Troubles? What further impact might these background experiences have upon the attitudes and actions of the Texas soldiers who assaulted the black troops on the levee at Milliken’s Bend? Might these experiences in their home state make the men of McCulloch’s Brigade more fiercely determined to prevent or dismantle any effort to recruit former slaves into the Union army?  Like many other aspects of the Milliken’s Bend story, many questions still remain unanswered.

Note: This chart when originally posted on this website on May 1, 2016 showed the 16th Texas Cavalry as having men from Washington County. The source for this information came from: Joseph H. Crute, Units of the Confederate States Army (Midlothian, VA: Derwent Books, 1987), 333, which indicates some men of the 16th Cav came from Brenham, which is in Washington County. However, thanks to @16thTxCav on Twitter, and based on original records, Crute’s information was found to be inaccurate. Furthermore, @16thTxCav stated that many men from that regiment came from Grayson County, a county which was originally omitted on the list above.  The chart was corrected to reflect this new information for both counties on May 8, 2016.