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August Carl
Weiss
by
Mike Cox | |
During
the Civil War not every Southern soldier served in the Confederate army because
he believed in slavery or hated Yankees. Some shouldered arms only because they
had to.
That was the case with August Carl Weiss, one of 2,000 men who
soldiered for the South in Waul’s Legion, a unit raised at Brenham by Thomas Neville
Waul.
Born in Germany, Weiss and his family arrived by ship at Indianola
in 1853. The family traveled to the Brenham area, where they settled near the
small community of Salem. Weiss grew to young manhood chopping cotton and doing
other chores on his family farm, including making furniture.
On July 9,
1861, he was married to Caroline Homburg. But before Weiss had time to settle
into family life, he ended up in the Confederate army. Whether he volunteered
under community pressure or submitted to conscription is not reported in a family
history published in 1964, but he became a private in an infantry company. Weiss’
older brother Fritz was in the same company.
August Weiss, as the family
history put it, “was not a happy soldier.” That’s not particularly surprising.
Most German Texans had no interest in the American political differences that
led to the war, though most of them opposed slavery.
The Weiss family
book is surprising in its candor. Though Weiss reluctantly shouldered arms for
the Confederacy, family lore has it that he made a personal vow that he would
not shoot anyone. When ordered to fire, he would deliberately aim high.
The
unit went from Texas to Arkansas and then to Louisiana. Ending up in Vicksburg,
Miss., Waul’s Legion helped defend the vitally important river town until its
fall to federal forces on July 4, 1863.
Not all of Waul’s soldiers shared
Weiss’ pacifism. A Yankee officer whose troops faced the Texans at Vicksburg later
wrote: “It was a tornado of iron on our left, a hurricane of shot on our right.
We passed through the moth of Hell. Every third man fell, either killed or wounded.”
Forty-seven of Waul’s men also died in the fight, with another 195 wounded,
but Weiss escaped unscathed. The young German happily signed a federal parole
that he would not take up arms again against the North and walked all the way
back to Texas. When Weiss finally reached Washington County, he found his cabin
had been destroyed in a fire, though his wife had survived. War-weary but happy
to be home, he rebuilt his homestead and tried to go about his life as a farmer.
But the Southern military did not feel honor-bound to abide by federal
paroles. When Confederate conscription agents came looking for Weiss to get him
back in the Army, he went into hiding. This time, he told folks he would shoot
to kill if confronted. A sympathetic friend identified someone with a club foot
as being Weiss, sending the “recruiters” on their way for a time, but Weiss eventually
got caught and forced into the military again.
Back in a reorganized
Waul’s Legion, he spent the rest of the war in Galveston. At least part of that
time, the family history notes, he spent clapped in ball and chain in the guardhouse,
his offense not known. Soldiers often got in trouble for drinking or some other
form of rowdy behavior, but Weiss was a devout Lutheran. A good guess would be
that his incarceration had something to do with his lack of investment in the
Southern cause.
The Southern military might have been better off giving
Weiss and the other German Texans a buy in the war. Modern research has shown
that Civil War military units with significant cultural differences did not make
for the best fighting outfits. Germans and Irish tended to keep to themselves,
leading to disunity and discipline problems. As one historian wrote of an artillery
unit with a mediocre war record, it “was more than a Rebel unit. They were a group
of rebels.”
A better word for Weiss would be “principled.” After the
war, Weiss told his family and friends that so far as he knew, he had not wounded
or killed anyone. But the war itself had not been so generous with the Weiss boys.
His health ruined, one week after returning home Fritz Weiss died, leaving a wife
and two young children.
August made it past Reconstruction, farming and
running a cotton gin, but he died at the relatively young age of 48 on Sept. 3,
1883. Not that he did not leave a legacy, one indicating that political convictions
had nothing to do with his manhood. He and his wife had 12 children, the last
a son born 10 days after his father’s death.
©
Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" -
February 16, 2005 column | |
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