Defending Texas' Frontier in the Civil War
Part IV of a five-part series. Continued from Part I, Part II and Part III.
The legislature authorized a new “regiment of Rangers” consisting of 10 companies to serve along the “Northern and Western frontier.” Called the simply the Frontier Regiment, and later designated as the 46th Texas Cavalry, the unit would serve as a comprehensive answer to Comanche concerns. In an attempt to address Texas’s historical inability to finance long-term military structures, the congress sought to attain national funding while retaining the benefits of operational control. Confederate President Jefferson Davis naturally vetoed the arrangement, citing constitutional issues and asserting Richmond’s political primacy. This tension between state and Confederate control, and war funding responsibility, would strain intergovernmental relations throughout the war.
The Frontier Regiment eventually comprised 1,089 men divided into nine companies across 18 camps. It organized throughout January of 1862, and had positioned itself along Texas’s western and northern counties by April of that year. The regiment occupied a similar chain of forts to that of its predecessor, but added more stations and extended the line south to the Rio Grande. While intended to serve as a centrally commanded organization like all active regiments, the new defense force continued two of the historical strengths of ranger organizations: it recruited men to serve in companies near their homes, and divided the companies into detachments of 25 men each. This strategy and structure harnessed the motivational factor inherent to all interested defenders while maximizing the breadth of patrolled territory.
Despite these improvements, the new regiment suffered from the same logistical shortages that plagued all Texan frontier units. Though the rangers initially registered only a few skirmishes, Amerindian raiding increased in the spring of 1863. In response, the new regimental commander, James McCord, ordered an increase in the size, distance, and duration of his patrols. Rather than using just small detachments to conduct localized patrols, the rangers now included larger maneuvers of a limited expeditionary nature. Though this program allowed a lesser frequency of patrols, it facilitated larger clearing operations closer to the Comanche heartland. A reconnaissance north of the Red River in May of 1863, during which three companies maneuvered both consolidated and separately, illustrated the new policy.
In the spring of 1863, as the Frontier Regiment organized, Texas fielded an additional cavalry battalion under the command of James Bourland to defend along the Red River in North Texas. Called the Border Regiment, due to its posture and mission along the seam between Texas and the Indian Territory, the unit eventually listed four officers and 564 soldiers in its ranks. Unlike Henry McCulloch’s command and the replacement Frontier Regiment, this battalion served as a regular army component in the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department.
The Confederacy officially designated Bourland’s command the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Division, and assigned him to the Northern Sub-District of Texas. Under this sanction the cavalry battalion defended 150 miles of porous frontier while also coordinating with Rebel authorities north of the Red River. In this endeavor the Border Regiment regularly confronted both Unionist elements and Amerindian warbands, while negotiating the task of answering both state and national priorities. The battalion served on this section of the Texas periphery in a vital, if underappreciated role, until the close of the war.
The third and final organization that protected Texas’s wartime frontier was the more expansive, and far less effective, Frontier Organization of State Troops. On December 15, 1863 the Texas Congress divided the twenty western counties into three military districts, each under centralized commands. They intended the Frontier Organization to replace the Frontier Regiment, which Confederate commanders ordered released for conventional operations against the Union Army. With so many Texan men now deployed across the continent, state authorities designed the new system to assume a distinctively militia posture, with all remaining military-aged men compelled to enlist in rotations of active and inactive service.
