During the War Between the States, otherwise known as the Civil War, a large part of the Texas Hill Country opposed the Confederacy. They were mostly German settlers led by Freethinkers and Forty-Eighters, but about 25% of the group was Anglo. In early 1861, this group organized the insurgency's political element known today as the Union Loyal League, but only called "The Organization" by its members. By March 1862, they had organized a secret military element of battalion size with three companies. The Organization believed that the Union was going to invade Texas by a two-pronged attack: one from the sea at Galveston, and the second overland from Kansas. These two Union prongs would link up at Austin, splitting the state along the Colorado River. The League's battalion, supported by Unionists from Austin, San Antonio, Comal and Medina Counties would rise up and declare the western part of Texas as the Free State of West Texas. This book tells the story of their effort, in their own words. Wm. Paul Burrier, Sr. was born in Fredericksburg, Texas, the center of the Texas German settlement. He graduated from Leakey High School, Southwest Texas Junior Texas College, and Texas A&M University, and did his graduate work at East Tennessee State University in Political Science. Paul spent over 24 years in Army Airborne and Special Operations, conducting counter-insurgency ops. Over his long military career, he went on four combat tours, and another one with the Pakistani Army, fighting an insurgency. His awards include the Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, and 26 other individual and unit awards.

German Americans were one of the largest immigrant groups in the Civil War era, and they comprised nearly 10 percent of all Union troops. Yet little attention has been paid to their daily lives--both on the battlefield and on the home front--during the war. This collection of letters, written by German immigrants to friends and family back home, provides a new angle to our understanding of the Civil War experience and challenges some long-held assumptions about the immigrant experience at this time. Originally published in Germany in 2002, this collection contains more than three hundred letters written by seventy-eight German immigrants--men and women, soldiers and civilians, from the North and South. Their missives tell of battles and boredom, privation and profiteering, motives for enlistment and desertion and for avoiding involvement altogether. Although written by people with a variety of backgrounds, these letters describe the conflict from a distinctly German standpoint, the editors argue, casting doubt on the claim that the Civil War was the great melting pot that eradicated ethnic antagonisms.

"[This book] concentrates upon a strongly bonded family during a period of separation that is necessarily preserved in much greater detail than their happier moments spent in one another's company. Being based to a large extent on letters that surely were never intended for the eyes of anyone outside the family and an intimate circle of friends, it also gives a more spontaneous view than most journals offer. These letters, preserved for more than eleven decades, are the record of years during which the Ernst Coreth family began really to enter into the affairs of its new homeland. No wish to magnify the importance of these people, no intent to dramatize their fate motivated the accompanying study, for much of what the Coreths experienced other immigrants experienced also"--Preface.

In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources—including thousands of letters and unpublished journals—he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants’ own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state was increasingly populated by immigrants from all parts of the South and foreign countries. When the war began, it was not just Texas that many of these soldiers enlisted to protect, but also their native states, where they had family ties.

A Story of the Loyal Germans of the Texas Hill Country During the Civil War The town of Fredericksburg, located in the Texas Hill Country near the center of the State, was settled by the German Immigration Society in 1846. The town was a hundred miles past the frontier so the Germans made their own peace treaty with the Camanche Indians who were at war with the Texas at that time. During the next fifteen years German settlers continued to arrive, spreading out to cover a large part of the surrounding country. They learned to farm local crops that suited the local soil and learned to be stockmen as well. In general they prospered. In 1861 the Germans watched Texas succeed from the Union and join the Confederacy with a great deal of dismay. They, like the rest of the frontier settlements, depended on the U.S. Army for protection from the Indians and Mexican bandits. The U.S. Army was rounded up by the Confederates and shipped north by boat leaving many of the frontier forts abandoned. None of the Germans owned slaves or believed in slavery so they did not want to participate with the South in what they saw as a fight for slavery. Most of the Germans had been through the process of becoming United States citizens so they had recently sworn their allegiance to the United States of America and they intended to honor that oath. In June of 1861 the Germans in the Texas Hill Country formed a Union League to express their support for the North in the war that had started at Ft. Sumter two months earlier. This alerted the Confederates to the problem that they had in their midst. While staying true to the history of this time and the historical timeline we shall move to the sping and summer of 1862, place characters in our story and let it move forward from there.