New Year's Battle: The Fight for Galveston (1862-1863)

One of the Union’s grand strategies was to strangle the Southern Coast with the Anaconda Plan. The Union government and navy purchased or enlisted as many civilian ships as it could to fulfill the enormous task of blocking off every Southern port. Up to 1863 the blockade was maintained with difficulty. Blockade runners regularly slipped through the cordon. To ease the blockade, the navy coordinated with the army to seize major Southern ports. This not only deprived the blockade runners of sites to drop off war supplies, it gave the navy facilities for maintaining and supplying their ships and the army launching points for further incursions. By the end of 1862, few major Southern ports remained open to blockade runners. At the dawn of 1863, however, Confederate General John Bankhead Magruder, newly arrived in the westernmost seceded state of Texas, launched a scheme that would defy the blockade. He aimed to take back Galveston and save Texas from a planned Union invasion.

 

The Great City of Texas

At the time of the Civil War Galveston was the largest city in Texas. Much of the state was still considered frontier territory and the time had not come yet for locations such as Houston and San Antonio. Galveston originated as a base of operations for the privateer Louis-Michel Aury, but soon the infamous Lafitte family from New Orleans took over. One of their most successful criminal enterprises was human trafficking. As Texas was part of Mexican territory and loosely controlled at that, the Lafittes were able to participate in the illegal slave trade with less intervention from the United State government. Even after Texas became an American state pirates continued to intercept slave ships in the Caribbean and sell their human cargo to Texas and Louisiana. The legal internal slave trade flourished as well, and Galveston boasted the largest slave market west of New Orleans. Since many slaves were involved in maritime businesses, slavery was enforced more rigidly than in other locations of the South. Heavier punishments and restrictions on the movement of blacks were necessary to prevent escape as slaves trained in ship work could would have the necessary skills to seize a boat and make for any number of Caribbean or Latin American countries where slavery was illegal. For a Southern city, Galveston also boasted an incredible number of immigrants. As a coastal city it was an ideal spot for people from Ireland, the German states, and other locations to enter the United States. By 1860 about 40 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born.[1]