“At Heart a True Southern Man”: Evangelical Discourse and Social Dilemma in a Texas Town 

It is easy to overlook the impact of evangelicalism on William Williston Heartsill. Although he was a professed Methodist by seventeen, there is no record of his conversion experience. The fastidious diary he kept during the Civil War made very few references to religious beliefs or practices. After the war, Heartsill was an active member of his church, but he was equally invested in the four social clubs he joined or founded. Neither he nor his progeny reflected in depth about his religion in any extant document. These factors may make it tempting to dismiss Heartsill as a case study in Civil War-era religion––but they are, in part, what make him an ideal subject.

In contrast to the many studies of Civil War evangelicalism that aim to link separatism to southern religion, this paper has a humbler, though perhaps equally elusive aim: to excavate the cultural influence of evangelicalism in the life of one southerner. To put it differently, Mitchell Snay has argued that southern religion “functioned simultaneously as an institution, a theology, and a mode of discourse.”[1] While many studies of wartime evangelicalism have focused on institution and theology, this paper aims to explore the discourses of evangelicalism as they were adopted and adapted in the lived experience of one Civil War solider.[2] Heartsill offers a particularly useful example because he engaged with evangelical discourses largely outside the influence of southern divines. As I will argue below, as Heartsill navigated social tensions, he incorporated those aspects of the discourse that seemed most useful to him––virtuous intention, individual moral responsibility, and the encouragement to make tough moral choices in the face of community pressure––and in so doing he contributed to the development of the southern evangelical worldview.[3]

Evangelical discourse––and the worldview it both pointed to and created––appears throughout Heartsill’s wartime diary, and its presence is most immediately seen by its real-world impact. As a wartime account, the diary hardly casts Heartsill in a good light. It describes in detail his fear of combat, his frustration with Confederate army authorities, his desertion from the front lines, and his anger with southern civilians for their loss of faith. The diary also reveals that the people of Marshall, Texas—the seat of Harrison county, an economic powerhouse with more enslaved people than any other county in the state—felt every bit as angry with him and his company at war’s end.[4] Yet when Heartsill substantially revised and then published his diary over a decade later in 1876, the unflattering portrayal of his wartime experience did not seem to reopen old wounds; instead, the people of Marshall elected him mayor five months after its publication.

This paper argues that Heartsill’s victory was a result of his successful employment of particular evangelical ideas to navigate a social paradox. Martial valor, masculinity, and honor were inextricably linked in the South, but Heartsill had few opportunities––and even less desire––to risk his life to earn social capital. To him, willingness to fight for the South was every bit as honorable as physically doing so. Throughout his diary, therefore, Heartsill invoked evangelical discourses surrounding virtuous intention, individual moral responsibility, and moral fortitude as Marshall’s citizenry publicly derided him and his company during the war. That discourse enabled Heartsill to balance the fear and frustration he felt during his military service on the one hand with the critical eye of his community on the other. By publicizing, and thereby performing, his intentionality through his diary, Heartsill aligned his personal intentions with communal standards of honor. That his community received his performance and rewarded his intentions with public office demonstrates the extent to which evangelical moral individualism came to harmonize with the communally-centered culture of honor that preceded evangelicalism.[5]

In this paper, I adopt the approach to evangelicalism outlined by John Patrick Daly, whose focus on evangelical moralism more closely aligns with Heartsill’s experience. Daly argues that evangelicalism describes “a sweeping cultural movement that celebrated individualism and moral self-discipline, rather than…technical aspects of certain Protestant churches and their theology.”[6] This approach not only works well for a study of popular evangelicalism, but it also highlights the difference between the discourse of evangelicalism and the discourse of honor that preceded it. In the latter, the community decided the individual’s worth based primarily upon communal perception of a person’s behavior. The individual did not aim to be honest but to be seen as honest.[7] In the former, intention mattered as much as, if not more than, behavior. The story of Heartsill’s success is the story of him negotiating between these two discourses.

This article begins with Heartsill’s company and the community of Marshall at the initial stages of the war, before either experienced death or material privation in earnest. During this brief period, evangelicalism aligned with the southern culture of honor rooted in whiteness, masculinity, and militarism––defending the South was not only honorable, it was godly. I compare this period to the war’s middle stages, when both the company and the town were forced to grapple with the realities of life during wartime. I then turn to the end stages of the war, when Heartsill and his company were stationed far from the front lines and the people of Marshall grew increasingly frustrated. Heartsill’s diary from this period highlights the widening gap between the ideals of southern honor on the one hand and evangelicalism on the other. Finally, I examine Heartsill’s return to Marshall after Appomattox, when relations between his company and the town were most strained. By literally and figuratively fighting to ensure white supremacy in Marshall and by casting his wartime actions as the outcome of evangelical idealism, Heartsill was able to reforge his connections to his fellow Confederate veterans and the town of Marshall.

 

“There Slumbers No Indifference to Your Fame”: The War’s Beginning

William W. Heartsill was born in 1839 in Louisville, Tennessee, but he did not stay long. It seems Heartsill had little interest in his father’s trade, carpentry, because he left home at thirteen to work as a merchant in Maryville, Tennessee, the Blount County seat. In 1856 he moved to Nashville, the state capitol, where he continued the same work, “proposed Religion and joined the [Methodist Episcopal] Church South.”[8] As it did for many young men in the South, Heartsill’s conversion symbolized his readiness to make his own way in the world.[9] After three years in Nashville, Heartsill again moved, this time to Marshall, Texas, the Harrison County seat.[10] Heartsill arrived in December of 1859, scarcely a year before Abraham Lincoln’s election galvanized the state’s secession.

Good soil and ample land drew many immigrants from the Deep South to Harrison County, and Marshall’s trade connections to Shreveport, Louisiana plugged planters directly into the world’s cotton market. Like the states of the Deep South, three-quarters of Harrison’s white families were planters, and nearly two-thirds owned at least one slave. Enslaved people made up more than fifty percent of the county.[11] Cotton was king in Harrison County; on the eve of the Civil War, eighty-five percent of farmers grew cotton and its profitability was increasing.[12]

The milieu in Marshall was similar to that of Heartsill’s home state of Tennessee––in the words of one historian, Marshall was “thoroughly southern in attitude and sentiment.”[13] Like many southern cities and towns, the courthouse and town square were Marshall’s geographic and social centers.[14] Evangelicalism was on the rise in the county, with the number of churches more than doubling between 1850 and 1860.[15] In the antebellum years, anti-dancing and temperance movements swept the community, along with periodic revivals.[16] The Methodist congregation of Marshall, which had been meeting since at least 1845, began construction of a large church on the east side of the town square in early 1860.[17] The board of trustees overseeing the church’s construction was comprised of Marshall’s top citizens.[18] Sometime in 1860, shortly after he moved to Marshall, Heartsill pledged one hundred dollars for the construction of that Methodist church.[19]

The shadow war loomed soon after Heartsill settled in Marshall. In the months before the Civil War, Marshall citizens vociferously advocated for secession for fear that “fanaticism” would turn the enslaved against their white enslavers and “literally baptize the white population of the South in fire and blood.”[20] Unlike other parts of Texas, which primarily appealed to the Texas Revolution of 1836 to drum up support for secession, the people of Marshall focused on fears of northern tyranny and the loss of the people they enslaved, echoing the language of secessionist evangelical ministers who had begun linking the South, slavery, and providence in their sermons and writing.[21]

When Texas seceded from the Union in February of 1861, the federal government removed its troops guarding the frontier and left north Texas vulnerable to Comanche raids. On April 1, 1861, the Harrison County sheriff went to Marshall to rally citizens to protect the frontier.[22] The Texas Republican (Marshall) ran an enlistment advertisement on April 6, and Heartsill signed up the next day.[23] For many southerners, enlisting in the military was the fastest and easiest way to build a reputation, which in turn was the key to social, economic, and political success.[24] Of his own motivations, Heartsill wrote only that the South’s “cause [was] just,” and that “a strict sense of duty…impelled” him to enlist.[25] However, as a young man on the make with thin ties to the town, it is perhaps no surprise that Heartsill was among the first citizens of Marshall to volunteer for the army. The Battle of Fort Sumpter began on April 12, 1861, only five days after he enlisted.

On April 19, the newly-enlisted men organized a company, electing Samuel J. Richardson captain. Richardson was a notorious figure in Marshall. Aside from his eye-catching leopard skin pants, he was also known for his role in a Knights of the Golden Circle plot to spread slavery to Mexico through a daring, though doomed, filibuster.[26] The men voted to call themselves the W.P. Lane Rangers after a local veteran from the Texas War for Independence. That evening, in full dress regalia, they attended a sermon delivered by Reverend William Carnes Dunlap, a New School Presbyterian minister.[27] Since they did not have a chaplain, they would not hear regular sermons once they left Marshall. The following day, the men marched into a town square filled with the “entire population of Marshall” and “hundreds from the vicinity.”[28] The Texas Republican described the purpose of the day’s ceremony, in which the women of the town would present the men with a ceremonial flag:

The ladies have thus nobly resolved to offer to the gallant Rangers on their departure, a public expression of their heartfelt sympathies for the arduous but glorious cause in which they have engaged. This is as it should be. The love and beauty of woman have always been intimately associated with the valor of the soldier and the sanctity of his cause.[29]

 

Standing beside the flag, one of the women, Sallie O. Smith, gave a speech invoking examples from Greco-Roman history and the Mexican-American War to urge the men to fight bravely. There was little mention of God and no reference to the theological justifications for war offered by southern clergy. Rather, Smith invoked the connection between honor and gender, which were tightly linked the antebellum South. The two were so entangled that, in many senses, a man’s honor rested on women.[30] An unfaithful wife or sexually promiscuous daughter brought shame on the family, for example.[31] More apropos to the scene in the town square, men earned honor by defending the virtue of women.[32] Smith underscored the link between female virtue and male honor in her speech:

Think you our hearts are untouched by magnanimous, disinterested, heroic daring? Believe it not. Know that beneath these slender forms which ordinarily your gallantry "suffers not the winds of Heaven to visit too roughly," there slumbers no indifference to your fame, your fortune or your achievements.[33]

By drawing attention to their own sexual restraint, the speaker cast herself and “every true Southern [woman]” in the square as models of female virtue in this ritualized drama.[34] The men, as a result, fulfilled the masculine ideals of southern honor.

At noon the Rangers began their march to the frontier.[35] They rode only a few minutes before they were surprised with a farewell feast. This show of hospitality signaled to the men that their service was already paying dividends of social capital.[36] After an hour, they were back on the road, the orderly marching they displayed at the town square ceremony forgotten.[37] The men trickled into the first campsite over the course of the evening and into the next day. None, according to Heartsill, were sober.[38] For the next month, the W.P. Lane Rangers made their way to San Antonio, enjoying parties and gifts in every town along the way with one exception––a union town called Belton, of which Heartsill wrote simply, “Shame on you.” [39] All in all, Heartsill found the Rangers “a verry pleasant mode of serving one’s Country.”[40]

The Lane Rangers officially mustered into Confederate service as an independent company in late May of 1861. The men agreed to do so on the condition that, one year from their initial enrollment, they would choose where and how they would continue their service. Unlike other companies from Harrison County, the W.P. Lane Rangers were not sent to the eastern fronts.[41] Instead, they were stationed two hundred miles west of San Antonio and assigned to patrol the unguarded western frontier. They served there until summer of 1862.[42] Their assignment on the frontier put the Rangers in a difficult position. On the one hand, it was relatively safe and they maintained their status as an independent company. On the other hand, they were now very far from the front lines where glory was to be won.

Boredom was their greatest challenge on the frontier. About thirty Rangers formed an infantry company to “drive dull care away,” and Heartsill himself was elected captain.[43] Despite the occasional morale boost––the women of Harrison County sending hats and shoes was an act “never to be forgotten by grateful hearts,” for example––the banality of daily soldiering took a toll on the men’s morale.[44] Two of their company died of illness before the end of 1861. Heartsill sent eulogies to the Texas Republican, calling one a “Christian Soldier” and noting that “T’s true they fell not in the fierce battle strife, but they fell nobly at their Post, where their country called them.”[45] These were the first of many eulogies Heartsill recorded, similar in style and tone to the evangelical death sermons that were “the first and most important interpretation of an individual’s impact and importance to his fellow man and to posterity.”[46] Heartsill’s eulogies were undoubtedly meant to cement the honor of his fallen comrades, who had not died earning glory in combat but nevertheless deserved the respect of Marshall’s citizens––as did the living Rangers serving on the frontier. Significantly, Heartsill’s eulogies negotiated between the internal state of the deceased, i.e., his patriotism and bravery, and possible external judgments. Heartsill’s concern about potential judgment was not misplaced, as Marshall was beginning to face wartime hardships.

By winter of 1862, the war was also taking an emotional and material toll on the citizens of Marshall. The Texas Republican published the first list of Harrison troop causalities February 15, 1862.[47] On March 22, 1862 the newspaper shrank to about of third of its physical size for lack of paper. A week later, on March 29, 1862, the Texas governor issued a special request for more troops, writing that it was the “honor” and “duty” of every Texan to defend his home. The paper’s tone had grown dire. The time has arrived, the editor wrote, “when it is the duty of all men to rally to defence of their country.” With those words, the Texas Republican announced the organization of a local militia to protect the town should the Union invade.[48]

In early April, the W.P. Lane Rangers celebrated the news that they were being relieved. Heartsill hoped to be sent closer to the front, because he and the others were “anxious to be placed where we can serve our Country with more credit to ourselves, and profit to DIXIE’S cause.”[49] The men made their way back to Marshall, where the paper had already announced their imminent return. When they arrived in mid-May, 1861, they were among the only young men left in town––the rest were on or near the front lines.[50] Captain Richardson organized a celebration for the men, which many in the town attended.[51] In so doing, Richardson modeled the respect he hoped the people of Marshall would grant his company. Beneath this party––and beneath Heartsill’s desire to leave for the front––lay anxiety about the Rangers’ social standing.

Contemporary academic discussions of honor often center around single, incendiary events such as a duel, but the lived experience of honor culture was more nuanced then these extraordinary eruptions of violence, and violence itself was often the result of complex and mounting social tensions.[52] For example, although Heartsill’s eulogies and eagerness to see combat demonstrated some anxiety about his status, the people of Marshall still housed the Rangers during the month-long furlough that followed their return from the frontier. After their furlough ended, the men camped a mile outside of town and waited still longer for Captain Richardson to secure them “the best position possible.”[53] When orders came, not from Richardson but from the commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department, the men balked. The commander, Heartsill wrote, may as well “write his orders in a sand bank…if we are not an Independent Co;, we intend to play it awhile anyway.”[54] The men therefore stayed near Marshall, awaiting their captain’s return. Heartsill and the company had to balance their desire for glory with their unwillingness to surrender their autonomy.

The situation changed after Richardson was wounded in the Seven Days Battle––a series of battles near Richmond––and his return to Marshall was delayed by several months.[55] By his reappearance in November 1862, the townspeople were frustrated, and Heartsill’s earlier anxiety about his social standing proved justified. “It is remarkable,” Heartsill wrote in mid-August, “the disposition manifested by some of the ‘Stay-at-home Guards,’ on account of our Company being at home so long.”[56] The “Stay-at-home Guards” were likely the militia that had been organized to protect the town, and their existence reminded both the townspeople and the Rangers of their own fears and frustrations. But, Heartsill continued, “[i]f they will reflect one moment, it is not the fault of the men, for I suppose there is not a Company in the service who is more patriotic, as our past record will show.”[57] Strictly speaking, the men could have obeyed orders and mustered into the Trans-Mississippi department, but that would have meant surrendering their independence and their horses. Heartsill, invoking evangelical morality to navigate his predicament, highlighted his willingness to fight. In so doing, he broadcast an internal alignment with southern ideas about independence that explained, even justified, his unwillingness to fight for that independence.

As historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes, “community pressures, not personal preferences, were often the basis of military valor.”[58] Heartsill and the Rangers did not bow to community pressure, however, even though they were at home in Marshall, as close as possible to communal judgment. As Daly suggests, the Rangers’ refusal to bow to communal pressure indicates a discursive shift. Evangelicalism “was leading the South away from the traditional physical penalties and social shaming as the means of self and social control” and toward “strict self-discipline, internalized guilt, personal consistency, [and] practical rationality.”[59] Heartsill’s emphasis on intention suggests the evangelical emphasis on personal moral responsibility was socially useful during the trials of war.

The W.P. Lane Rangers’ first battle occurred on January 10, 1863, shortly after they returned to combat. After two days of fighting at the Battle of Arkansas Post, the Rangers and other Confederate soldiers defending Fort Hindman surrendered.[60] Union troops escorted the captured Rangers through the North. In St. Louis, their captors sent Heartsill, his friend Thomas A. Elgin, and other Rangers to Camp Butler, while they sent the remainder of the Rangers to Camp Douglas.[61] Winter in the camps was hard, and when two men died at Camp Douglas in February, Heartsill lamented his inability to “pen a worthy memorial” for them, but noted there was “a faint glimmering start of consolation…they died in a noble cause.”[62] Two more died at Camp Douglas in mid-March, and Heartsill again emphasized that their deaths were “noble sacrifices” for independence.[63]

Death was not the only form of loss at Camp Butler. In exchange for freedom, some Confederate prisoners took an oath of allegiance to the United States in which they vowed not to rejoin the war. Heartsill wrote that those who took the oath did “not deserve the name of Confederate soldier…they are enlisted by name not in heart in the Southern cause.”[64] When one Ranger took the oath in order to go care for his family, however, Heartsill “had nothing to say…I believe at heart he is a true Southern man.”[65] While it is possible that comradery inclined Heartsill towards generosity in the latter case, the language with which Heartsill defended the Ranger indicates that evangelicalism had significantly affected his worldview. Contrary to purely secular honor culture, for evangelicals “the courage to act rightly when religious or moral principle diverged from popular opinion also formed an indispensable part of the character of any truly great man.”[66] From the evangelical perspective, the Ranger’s intention for taking the oath superseded the inherent shamefulness of the act itself.

After a hard winter, the Rangers were exchanged for Union prisoners in early April 1863.[67] The men reached their temporary camp before their officers, and they began to worry the officers might not be exchanged at all, “for it is hard enough to be under men that we know; and what a time is before us if we are to be ordered around to suit the whims of some little upstart of an officer that was a third rate man at home before the war.”[68] The situation turned out even worse than Heartsill feared. On May 11, he learned that the men were to be sent, not to the Trans-Mississippi Department, but instead to Tullahoma, Tennessee and mustered into infantry service.[69] Heartsill wrote that the men felt “a little ruffled” in their new company because they were treated “like the poor boy at the frolic” and forced to spend rainy nights without tents.[70] For Heartsill and the Rangers with him, such rough treatment was a far cry from the dinners and parties they experienced in Texas. As time passed, it would become the source of deep frustration for the men.

On June 26, 1863, Heartsill experienced his first fight on foot. It also ended in defeat, which Heartsill blamed in part on a group of Confederate officers who took off to attend a “country dance” and a midnight retreat.[71] The men were forced to march through the cold and mud for the next several days, adding to Heartsill’s annoyance. His company, he noted, was completely exhausted and “barely able to stand, all for what? just for some little stuck up officer to show HIS authority.” For southern men, authority and honor were tightly linked. Richardson wielded easy authority over his men for several reasons, the first among which was that they opted to enlist under him. Nearly as important was Richardson’s eagerness to broadcast his respect for the men, as he did when they returned to Marshall from the frontier. If an authority figure did not adequately respect the honor of his subordinates, then they were justified in seeking redress.[72]

After another day’s hard march through mud and rain, Heartsill had “seen enough of this business” and wrote, “if I had my way I would withdraw from the concern; and invest my capital west of the river.”[73] Heartsill viewed his situation through an economic lens not only because he was a merchant by trade, but also because the rise of the market economy and Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s shaped the southern evangelicals’ understanding of an individual’s character. Among southern evangelicals, one should have the moral fortitude to exercise self-restraint while simultaneously pursuing success. Evangelicalism therefore shifted the locus from the external, honor-based system to an internal, character-based system more suited to free market capitalism.[74]

Less than a week later, four men absconded from Bragg’s regiment to return to their original company. Heartsill was sympathetic: “call it desertion if you please; but I will assert that there are not four better soldiers in the Confederate Army than these men, they are not shirking the service; then is it really desertion?”[75] Desertion was not uncommon among Confederates, and it was especially common for soldiers who felt strong attachments to their regions or their individual companies.[76] As time passed in the infantry, Heartsill’s thoughts turned increasingly to the Rangers, his ambition to earn glory, and the generous treatment he experienced in Texas.[77]

As a result, Heartsill’s mood grew darker as the summer of 1863 progressed. In August, more men left Bragg’s army to meet their own companies west of the Mississippi.[78] Life was all heat, drilling, and boredom. Midway through the month, one of the men “raised a yell” to break the monotony, and soon the entire camp was whooping. The colonel in charge of their camp, Roger Q. Mills, or “KING ROGER” as Heartsill called him, ordered the men to be quiet, proving to Heartsill that “petty tyranny now reigns over this Regiment; such as we had over us at Camp Butler.”[79] Such treatment justified, even demanded, insubordination.

Combat loomed during the month of September, but Heartsill’s mind was elsewhere. While Bragg’s army maneuvered around Union forces outside Chattanooga, he learned that another Ranger made it back to Texas to rejoin the company: “one by one we will all get over after awhile…leaving from the hospital seems to be the best plan.” Heartsill also qualified his frustrations:

It probably does not show true patriotism to a person unacquainted with the circumstances with which we are surrounded; for a southern solider to complain or to find fault, yet by any one who knows how we are situated and how we have been treated we are willing to be judged, here are TEN of course Company in the Infantry service; while our Company proper EIGHTY strong are serving as Calvary, but we hope for better days and that at least justice will be done us and that we may soon be allowed to return to OUR COMPANY.[80]

 

Whether Heartsill was writing this for himself or his audience, the sentiment was the same: he felt that his infantry service was so dishonorable that it warranted open complaint and even desertion. Both his hopes of returning to Texas and his frustrations with infantry service were soon forgotten as the Battle of Chickamauga  commenced.

Heartsill’s original account of Chickamauga was terse. In some cases, however, he reflected on his circumstances. One of his musings on the upcoming battle comingled racial categories, gender ideals, regionalism, Christian symbolism, and honor:

Oh how many aching hearts would to night be scattered o’re our land; did our friends at home know what a few days will bring forth, cruel; cruel war and thrice cruel invaders that come to drench our ‘Sunny South’ in blood and drag our people to worse than slavery, up men of the South and strike for God, and our native land, may the God of Justice hover o’re our battle [flag]…[81]

 

Despite his fear of the Union forces dragging southerners to “worse than slavery,” when the battle ended Heartsill looked out upon the field and wrote, “wee can but forgive an Enemy even as savage a foe as the Federal Soldiers is when wee see him stiff in death or suffering from wounds. The sight was truly hart rending.”[82] Although southerners forged their communal identity partly through juxtaposition to northerners, the sight of their mangled bodies made it too hard for Heartsill to demonize them.[83] In postwar years he could not afford to be so forgiving.

According to Heartsill, General Bragg promised the Rangers that they could return to their units after the battle.[84] October 6, 1863, Heartsill learned that General Bragg had denied his company’s request to return to Captain Richardson’s command. His thoughts again turned to members of Bragg’s infantry who had already abandoned their post. These men would return to their original companies, “where they can, and WILL be treated like volunteers should be, and not be draged and cuffed about like the meanest Negro that ever disgraced a southern plantation.”[85] The slave was the lowest member in the southern social hierarchy––if the slave fit into the hierarchy at all. Although the slave existed outside honor culture altogether, slave ownership and the socioeconomic benefits it afforded was the basis of southern honor.[86] Further, if Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese are correct in asserting evangelicalism’s integral connection to the slave system––particularly the white ownership of Black bodies––then Heartsill comparing himself to a slave under Bragg suggests a perversion of the divinely-sanctioned social order.[87] Here, at his lowest point, Heartsill began contemplating desertion.

Heartsill first documented his intent to leave Bragg’s army on November 2, 1863.[88] His original diary reveals his anger:

Conscripts may be treated bad but if any one can show where their rights have been trampled upon equal to our present condition then he is to be pitied. In the name of right and justice does Gen. Bragg think a soldier has no pride no self respect nay he is evry day dragging us down in the name of God who would stand this treatment…wee cannot help but feel we are degraded by submitting to these outrages and feel it in our power to submit no longer.[89]

Before Chickamauga, Heartsill’s writing about desertion revealed at least some evangelical influence insofar as it emphasized his character and not the act itself. After Chickamauga, however, Heartsill did not need to justify his actions. Once Bragg broke his promise, Heartsill’s situation invoked the classic tropes of violated honor: tyrannical authority, violated autonomy, and injured pride.[90] Desertion, in other words, was more socially acceptable, and there was no dilemma to navigate.

The following day, Heartsill noted, marked the anniversary of the Rangers’ second departure from Marshall. Additionally, the Rangers in Bragg’s camp received a letter from Captain Richardson.[91] With the memories of better days on his mind, he planned his escape, and, on the appointed day, Heartsill, his friend Thomas A. Elgin, and two men from different companies left Bragg’s army.

During the journey back to Texas, Heartsill kept a daily record. Sometime after he reached Texas, he revised these entries on the blank pages in the back of his diary, filling up those pages in reverse order until he had finished. When his daily entries reached the rewritten portion on February 12, 1865, he sent that diary home for safekeeping. Therefore, Heartsill revised his account sometime between Christmas of 1863 and February 12, 1865. Furthermore, the changes he made to the original diaries were substantial and included minute details, indicating that Heartsill likely rewrote the entries from November 7 to December 21, 1863 soon after his arrival in Marshall in December 1863. The events of Heartsill’s published account matched the rewrite very closely, suggesting that Heartsill still found the wartime explanation of his desertion adequate a decade later as he was publishing his diary. In those revisions, Heartsill highlighted that the men did not intend to desert the war entirely, but only to return to their original companies.

For example, Heartsill used deliberately martial language in his revision, signaling that the men still saw themselves as soldiers. He, Elgin, and Connelly “fell in” with the other Confederate troops. Before bed, they held a “council”––which he revised again between 1874 and 1876 to read “a council of war.”[92] Later, on November 13, Heartsill’s described a “short council of war” after which he was “sent to reconoiter.”[93] The first revision referred to their travels as “marches” and their breaks as “halts.”[94] The men “flanked” towns, houses, or in one memorable instance, a dog.[95] Elsewhere, Heartsill rarely employed such a lexicon, with the exception of his battle experiences. Either for his own psychological benefit or for the benefit of eventual readers, martial language broadcast that despite appearances, Heartsill was a dutiful soldier.

In his initial revision, Heartsill added several interactions with both civilians and soldiers that did not appear in the original account. Heartsill and the men, pretending to have escaped from a Union prison camp and be on their way back to Bragg’s army, stayed with a woman and her children on November 12. Heartsill speculated that they were all “Unionists” who regularly housed deserters, and as such, she felt “threatened by the authorities,” i.e. the four men.[96] On November 14, a week after leaving Bragg’s camp, the Texans ran into a group of Mississippian deserters. Heartsill wrote that their “company was not agreeable” and that they “felt Criminal while in their presence.”[97] In another instance, a Confederate soldier spotted the men, who were hiding out behind a bush. Rather than capture them, the soldier warned them that his captain was nearby and that they should escape, which they promptly did. Although the man’s information saved them from capture, the makeshift company “with one accord pronounced him an unreliable soldier for he did not know under what circumstances we wer [sic] in those woods."[98] These examples indicate that, although Heartsill felt justified in deserting Bragg’s army, he still felt the need to highlight his own strength of character by comparing himself to “unreliable” soldiers and Union supporters.

After several weeks of pleasant travel, Heartsill and Elgin reached the Trans-Mississippi Department in Shreveport, having separated from their traveling companions. Heartsill used counterfeit papers to convince the officer to allow the men to return to Richardson’s command. Fortunately, the officer “never asked us where we had been since our exchange in May if he had then a tale would have to been fixed up.”[99] Curiously, Heartsill’s original did not include this account; he added it in his first revision. Heartsill and Elgin reunited with Captain Richardson just before Christmas, 1863. Richardson gave them “unlimited furlough” to return to Marshall and gather more gear.[100] Meanwhile the rest of the company was in Tyler, Texas doing “heavy but unthanked for duty.”[101]

The war grew more difficult between 1861 and1863, and Heartsill and the Rangers’ were either far from combat or losing battles. Meanwhile, the people of Marshall––and especially the women––who had pledged to support them were growing frustrated, both by the material privations in east Texas and by the Rangers’ apparent laziness or cowardice. To relieve this tension, Heartsill’s diary drew increasing attention to his character as he chronicled his wartime experiences. By the war’s end, those tensions would get much worse.

“Othelo’s Occupation Gone”: Honor and Gender at War’s Twilight

During the early months of 1864, the Rangers guarded Federal prisoners in Tyler, about sixty miles west of Marshall. At first, Heartsill was disappointed not to fight, writing “Othelo’s occupation’s gone.” [102] He referred to Act III scene III of Othello, in which Othello became convinced of his wife’s infidelity:

I had been happy, if the general camp,
Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known. O, now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
[…]
Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone!

 

In citing this scene, Heartsill reinforced the implicit connection between women, military valor, and honor. Othello’s honor rested upon his wife’s sexuality: her infidelity rendered his martial valor impotent, unable to win him glory. With these words, Heartsill unknowingly foreshadowed the way in which gender, military valor, and social acceptance would plague him and the Rangers as the war came to an end.

By summer 1864, the relationship between the Rangers and some Marshall citizens became tense, even hostile. In April of that year, Union forces invaded northeast Texas, something the citizens of Marshall had feared since strategic Confederate losses in summer 1863. Confederate forces successfully halted the Federal incursion, but from then on the community took its defense into its own hands, dedicating six companies to the protection efforts. In addition to the threat of Federal invasion, the people of Harrison suffered more privation than before––everyday items such as coffee and flour were harder to come by, and currency deflation demoralized the wealthy community of Marshall.[103] These circumstances undoubtedly contributed to the conflict bristling between the Rangers and the town.

The first hint of trouble appeared in Heartsill’s May 23, 1864 entry. After reiterating that their “duty is still very heavy,” he wrote that the men are anxious to “get away from here [Tyler], for we are reaping no honors, but are continually abused by scores of BLOCKHEADS at home, and in the Army, because we are not at the front.”[104] Several days later, a group of Rangers returned from a trip to Harrison C, where

…they, of course, heard the usual denunciations against our Company, and some are very bitter because we were not in the late fight at Mansfield, and about nine tenth of us killed; one WOMAN! remarked, ‘That it was a pity that Ricahrdson’s Company was’nt there (Mansfield,) for they might have saved the life of some good man, by stopping the bullet’” we would mearly suggest to the said ‘WOMAN,’ that if HER husband had not deserted from the Melitia camp, then she might ‘Throw stones.’[105]

 

As this entry makes clear, the people of Harrison County had been complaining about the W.P. Lane Rangers long enough for their aspersions to reach the men. For Heartsill and his comrades, steeped in the culture of southern honor, these complaints––particularly from women––would have been both shaming and emasculating.

The entry also points to several overlapping factors contributing to the towns’ anger. First, the Rangers were not at the front lines, but instead serving sixty miles west of Marshall––farther from the front lines than the citizens of Marshall themselves. Second, other companies suffered catastrophic losses while the Rangers experienced none. Conservative estimates suggest that up to fifty percent of eligible Harrison men entered service in the first two years of the war alone.[106] For those left behind, the danger and death men faced on the front lines was all too near.

On July 11, 1864, the Lane Rangers were ordered to Louisiana. In his original diary, Heartsill recorded the news simply, writing that a “majority of the men” received this news with “delight.” His published version was more jubilant: “This is GRAND, GLORIOUS, and WELCOME news; the very thing that a majority of the men have wished for, lo these many months.”[107] During his time in Louisiana, Heartsill suffered periodic “chills,” the aftermath of an illness that left him bedridden for eleven days.[108] On December 16, 1864, still experiencing the effects of illness, he passed through Marshall without stopping.[109] Before this, Heartsill enjoyed the praise civilians lavished on him. But on this occasion, despite his sickness, he either did not want to engage with the townspeople or assumed that they did not want to engage with him. His unwillingness to stop also underscores that Heartsill immigrated to Marshall scarcely a year before the war began and had no family to visit there ––or to defend his reputation while the rest of the “BLOCKHEADS” insulted him and his company. And this, in turn, begs the question: what would Heartsill do when the war was over? Would he, or could he, return to Marshall?

The question likely entered Heartsill’s mind as rumors of surrender crisscrossed the Confederacy. “I say peace never,” he wrote, “if slaveery [sic] is to perish with it; let’s fight it out and GAIN all, or fight it out and LOSE all.”[110] A few days later, several of the W.P. Lane Rangers drafted a resolution to cross the Mississippi voluntarily and “fight the incar[n]ate fiend” so that they might “rescue our noble brothers who have stood the shock of terrible battle for three and a half years.”[111] Of the sixty-one Lane Rangers present, thirty signed this resolution, including Heartsill.

Exactly one month after Appomattox, Heartsill served as secretary for yet another meeting of Rangers. On May 9, they resolved that they were “as fully determined to sta[n]d by our Color, and endure any privations, and offer any sacrifices” as they were in the beginning of the conflict. Moreover, the men had “perfect confidence in, and will render willing obedience to our Commanding officers” and would fight as long as there was “a Confederate soldier to vindicate the cause of Southern freedom.” The men sent the completed contract to the Texas Republican for publication, but their dedication could not stop the inevitable.[112] The W.P. Lane Rangers were disbanded on May 20, 1865. The men, Heartsill wrote in his diary, fulfilled their duty with honor. The failure of the Confederacy rested on “OUR OWN PEOPLE AT HOME,” who “should and MUST blame themselves.”[113]

Four years of hardship had changed things for both Heartsill and the people of Marshall. Heartsill’s eagerness to defend Marshall’s citizenry had been replaced with bitterness at their lack of faith, and Ms. Sallie O. Smith’s pledge of eternal loyalty to the men of the W.P. Lane Rangers was forgotten. During the war, Heartsill appealed to evangelical discourse to justify himself and the Rangers in the face of communal judgment. With the war over, Heartsill and the Rangers would have to reintegrate into Marshall society.

“So Honest are We in the Full Conviction, That We are Doing Right”: After the War

When Heartsill returned to Marshall, he found its citizens struggling to maintain their old way of life. Andrew Jackson Hamilton was appointed the provisional governor of Texas in June of 1865. Many of the appointments he made were non-secessionist northerners known to the Harrison community and so moderate that even the editor of the Texas Republican supported them. Some former Confederate soldiers were appointed to or won other positions in Harrison. The W.P. Lane Ranger’s Captain Samuel J. Richardson, for example, was elected representative to the Texas Legislature in 1866.[114] Despite these relatively mild postwar political developments, the citizens of Harrison still feared the abolitionist “fanatics of the North” who, along with their southern agents, “would be pleased to see every white man in the South disenfranchised and the right of suffrage given exclusively to the negroes.”[115] As the Texas Republican predicted, the Black vote dominated the local elections of 1866 by a wide margin.[116]

For the citizens of Marshall, any form of Black power was anathema. In mid-1866, rumors that the white Federal troops occupying Marshall would be replaced by an all-Black company exacerbated the white inhabitant’s frustration with Black political power. The Texas Republican expressed the conservative townspeople’s reactions to these rumors: “To send [Black troops] here, will be to humiliate the citizens, and to make them feel as if there was an intention to degrade them.”[117] Black troops eventually were stationed in Marshall without incident until February of 1867.[118] For the citizens of Marshall, this was the ultimate insult and confirmation that the North intended to enslave white southerners at the hands of Black people.

White Republicans and Black freedmen became more politically active in Marshall after the Republican Elisha M. Pease was appointed governor of Texas in 1867.[119] At the end of that year, two Republicans––one of whom was a Black Union Loyal League leader named Scipio McKee––led a rally at the Marshall Courthouse. Marshall’s sheriff, his deputy, and Samuel J. Richardson tried to break up the rally. They only succeeded in doing so when Richardson fired his pistol into the courthouse ceiling.[120] This was the first instance of a conservative Marshall citizen turning to violence to quash Republican political advances. The Redeemers’ war on Marshall had begun.

In March of 1868, the citizens of Marshall tried to organize more effective non-violent opposition to the Republicans, who by then had succeeded in calling a state constitutional convention. The Texas Republican feared this would inevitably “radicalize and Africanize the state.” The Republican warned that “a set of depraved demagogues” was “thoroughly organized” and using “Loyal Leagues, a secret, oath-bound organization” to manipulate Marshall elections. As it had in 1861, the newspaper issued a call to arms: “In this condition of things, it behooves the intelligent conservative people of the state to organize as early as possible, and prepare to defeat the constitution which the mongrels may adopt.”[121]

About 125 people heeded the paper’s call and attended a meeting to organize conservative resistance. Several of the town’s elite were elected to a leadership committee, including the Texas Republican’s editor, Samuel J. Richardson, and two trustees of the Methodist Church. The group organized “conservative clubs” for each of Marshall’s voting precincts designed to rally voters to the Democratic cause, particularly sympathetic Black people.[122] Heartsill also took up the Texas Republican’s call to action: sometime in 1868, Heartsill and Thomas A. Elgin, who accompanied Heartsill on his escape from Bragg’s army, helped establish the Ku Klux Klan in Marshall.[123]

The continued success of the Republican party in local elections for the next half-decade intimates that the Klan did not at first successfully disenfranchise Black men. Their failure to do so was likely the result of the presence in Marshall of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Federal troops, and the Union Loyalty League, another clandestine organization. This secret society of Union loyalists formed in 1863 and became active in Texas in the mid-to-late-1860s. Among other things, the Loyalty League ensured that Black men could safely cast their votes in Harrison County elections.[124] Civilians came to view the Klan as a necessary and in-kind response to the Union League, believing the Klan could stop the League’s subversive activities and halt Black supremacy.[125] To do so, the Klan patrolled Marshall’s streets and, in the words of one Dunning School historian, committed violence against freedmen who “proved themselves to be too recalcitrant and more serious means of dealing with them than terrorizing had to be adopted.”[126] The Klan gave Heartsill and Elgin the opportunity to continue demonstrating their willingness to defend Marshall’s antebellum social order––and perhaps to get back into the town’s good graces.

Aside from the Klan, Heartsill participated in an impressive number of secret organizations in the Reconstruction period. The first Texan chapter, or “tribe,” of the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM) was founded in Marshall around 1866, and sometime between that year and 1869 Heartsill served as the leader, or “Sachem,” of the Marshall lodge. In 1869, Heartsill helped establish an IORM lodge in Shreveport, Louisiana.[127] Heartsill was also an active Freemason, participating in both the Scottish Rite and the York Rite. He served as secretary of the Marshall Lodge from 1869 to 1908. In addition to the Masons, Heartsill joined the Independent Order of Oddfellows and the Knights of Pythias.[128] In these groups, as in the Klan, Heartsill fell into familiar patterns, serving in the same kinds of leadership capacities––especially secretary––as he did among the Rangers.

Through these activities, Heartsill helped sacralize whiteness. Sacred, a Emile Dukrheim defined the term, refers to an unquestionable or untouchable social category.[129] Heartsill and his Klavern forcibly enscribed a color line in Marshall’s social, political, and geographic landscapes, ensuring that the two races would not mix—in effect, setting whiteness apart as a protected category. But whiteness had already been defiled, from the perspective of white Marshall citizens, both when emancipation made the newly freed people equal to whites in political status and when a regiment of Black Union troops occupied the city. The Klavern’s violence was also a means through which the white community could feel as though it was defending its sacrality, ritually purifying itself through the shedding of Black blood.[130] Furthermore, Klansmen’s performances drew on a long tradition of minstrel theatricality. By invoking minstrel traditions, the Klansmen, perhaps unconsciously, rehearsed the same themes as minstrel shows: elevating white men while denigrating Black men.[131]

Heartsill also sacralized whiteness through participation in his evangelical church. He served as a trustee and a steward for the Methodist Church to which he had pledged one hundred dollars before the war, posts he likely took up immediately after the war. In 1876, he became church secretary.[132] Such service undoubtedly perpetuated his reputation in the long run, but one exploit solidified him as both a devotee to the church and the southern cause. During the war, Federal troops in need of metal confiscated the bells from Marshall’s churches, including Heartsill’s Methodist Church. Sometime during Congressional Reconstruction, while Federal troops were stationed near Marshall, Heartsill allegedly broke into their camp and stole a replacement bell––an act the church still celebrates today and which partly accounts for its place on the Historical American Building Survey.[133] Although there is insufficient historical evidence to support the bell incident, it has nevertheless taken on the mantle of truth for Marshall citizens.

If approached as a myth––a “true story” that gives “dramatic meaning to forces, desires, and impulses that are realities for their age”––the legend of the church bell tells us much about the relationship among evangelicalism, soldiers, and the town after Appomattox.[134] The church building itself was never separated from the realities of the Civil War. During the conflict, its basement housed arms, munitions, saddles, hats, gloves, and other supplies, all made in Harrison County. The Confederate government of Missouri, exiled from its home state in 1863, held its legislative sessions in its sanctuary––a sanctuary built by enslaved labor.[135] The church, slavery, and the Confederacy were therefore physically linked in Marshall, and the bell’s tolls broadcast their connection. Then Union silenced the bell, melting it down to aide in the war against the South and muting the townspeople’s spiritual and martial resistance. To restore the church’s bell, Heartsill had to break into a Union camp and steal a new one. When Heartsill’s stolen bell rang, therefore, it reverberated with multiple meanings. It reminded the town that the spiritual heart of their community and the center of their war efforts had been raided by Union “fiends.” At the same time, the new bell signaled not only that the supposed fight against Union oppression and Black supremacy was ongoing, but also that it could be won despite the Union occupation.

In the postwar years, Heartsill enacted a narrative that existed at the level of bodily experience––senses, movements, and emotions. The hourly sounding of the bell was a sensory reminder of Heartsill’s heroism, and a symbolic call to continue the fight for Marshall––centered at an evangelical church built by enslaved labor with deep ties to the Confederacy. His physical movement through the town similarly connected evangelicalism and the southern cause. One day, he sat as a member at the Oddfellows Hall––which, incidentally, also housed Confederate supplies during the war.[136] Another day, he rode the streets as a Klansman, violently suppressing Black sociopolitical power and rectifying the outrage and shame of Black and Republican leadership. And still another he sat as a steward of his church. As he traversed the town, he connected Confederate spaces and religious spaces, Confederate veterans and townspeople, tying them together with a shared thread: to fight perceived Union and Black influence over Marshall and return to white political, economic, and social supremacy. In this narrative, Heartsill made whiteness sacred by protecting it as an unassailable physical, political, and social category and by weaving whiteness into the physical structure of his church.

It was only after Heartsill began inscribing the myth of sacred whiteness onto the Marshall landscape that he published his wartime diary. It was a tedious process. Each of the diary’s nearly 300 pages––which included not only his diary entries, but also whatever pictures, troop and causality lists, and newspaper articles he could find––had to be individually set and printed. The revision process, as described above, was extensive. Heartsill took great care to emphasize throughout that his actions, most especially his desertion, were morally justifiable: “We know what those will say who are disposed to do us injustice, but our friends will we hope look at our situation in its true light; for as true as the sun doth shine; nay, so certain as there is a God who ruleth, so honest are we in the full conviction, that we are doing right [emphasis mine].”[137] In publishing his diary, Heartsill performed his virtuous intentions, individual moral responsibility, and ability to make moral choices despite pressure to do otherwise. Coupled with his dedication to restoring white supremacy in Marshall, the diary convinced the people of Marshall that Heartsill was a “true southern man.”[138]

The diary represents Heartsill’s solution to the dilemma that plagued him from the early stages of the war. That dilemma that is best understood as a religious problem because it represented a choice between two opposing worldviews. In one worldview, honor was sacred––an anchor for organizing social networks and navigating interactions. In the other, individual moral agency and intentionality played a similar role. Heartsill successfully navigated this apparent paradox by merging the two worldviews, which he did partly by connecting them to sacralized whiteness and partly by broadcasting his intentions through his published diary. Heartsill’s post-publication popularity reveals both that his diary successfully incorporated evangelical discourses and that the townspeople were willing to accept those discourses.

In November 1876, five months after finishing publication and two years before Redeemers took control of the county, the citizens of Marshall elected Heartsill mayor and his friend Thomas A. Elgin alderman.[139] In April of 1881, the two men were elected aldermen.[140] The next year, the men were elected to the board of directors of the Marshall and Northern Railway Company.[141] In 1887, Heartsill was elected vice president of the same railway company.[142] In 1896, both Heartsill and Elgin were delegates at the Democratic state convention; the men also participated in party leadership in a variety of lesser capacities.[143]

In 1892, in the wake of his success as a town leader, Heartsill helped organize the W.P. Lane Ranger camp of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV)––a noteworthy name considering both the townspeople and local army companies insulted the Rangers at war’s end. Heartsill served as second lieutenant and Elgin “orderly of the day.”[144] In the two decades that followed, Heartsill delivered eulogies for his fallen comrades just as he had during the war. He also wrote biographies of famous Confederate generals, including Stonewall Jackson, whom he labeled “the Soldier Saint of the Lost Cause.”[145]

After the 1892 creation of the Marshall chapter of the UCV, women provided snacks at meetings and offered assistance to families in need. In 1900, the women of Marshall founded a chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Laura Elgin, wife of Heartsill’s friend Thomas Elgin, organized the chapter. She was the club’s first president, and in 1903 she oversaw design, selection, and fundraising for a Confederate monument. The group ultimately erected a large marble statue of a young “Johnny Reb.” It was completed in 1905 and dedicated on January 6, 1906––Robert E. Lee’s birthday.[146]

By the time of Heartsill’s death in July 1916, Marshall was, in the words of its own citizens, a town made up of “separate realities, half black, half white.”^[147] Those separate realities stemmed from Marshall’s strict policy of segregation. Any violation of the color line on the part of Black residents led to swift intercession. In January of 1922, for example, nearly 400 hooded Klansmen marched to the town square, observed by an estimated 10,000 citizens, some of whom cheered and waved.[148] Black people were prohibited to shop on the east side of the town square.[149] During the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, “whites of Marshall, long accustomed” to their perception of Black people as “docile” were “stunned when students from Wiley and Bishop College [both historically Black] asked for service at all-white lunch counters.”[150] When the federal government finally forced Marshall to integrate in 1964, the grandson of Texas governor Edward Clark lamented, “Well, today we lost the Civil War.” An elderly women reflected on Clark’s comment: “Up to that time, we had won it.”^[151]

Some, however, attempted to keep the fight alive with reasonable success. In the late 1970s, the Klan attempted to recruit members in Marshall and, potentially, move the state headquarters there. Some Marshall citizens publicly welcomed the move, though it ultimately failed to materialize.[152] Marshall was among the last cities in the country to integrate schools. One local woman recalled that the holdout schools finally integrated in the late 1980s.[153] Just before the new millennium, the Black-white color line remained––the town country club, for example, had no Black members and there was minimal mixed-race social interaction in public.[154] In 2003, as Marshall entered the Nuevo South, descendants of Civil War veterans in Marshall, Texas organized Camp #2402 of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans.[155] They named their camp after William Williston Heartsill and meet monthly to strategize the defense of Confederate monuments.[156] The town’s own statue still stands, gazing toward the Methodist Church and the rising sun.

---

 

[1] Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 6.

[2] Snay argues that “[t]he relationship between religion and Southern separatism can be most efficiently and reliably traced through the thoughts and actions of the Southern clergy.” Gospel of Disunion, 6. As I will demonstrate below, Heartsill’s own motivations for enlisting in the war paint a more complicated picture of the relationship between religion and separatism. Additionally, nearly every essay in Religion and the American Civil War focuses on southern divines or other top-down theologies of separatism and the war. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[3] David Chidester argues that “religious worldviews create context for the construction of human identity within networks of symbolic classification and symbolic orientation that are intricately interwoven in the beliefs, practices, and forms of associations that make up the multidimensional phenomenon of religion.” Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 48. I will argue throughout this essay that southern honor culture and evangelicalism were two concurrent, though not exactly comingled, worldviews in the antebellum and wartime South insofar as each offered a classificatory system for the construction of human identity. While some scholars––most especially and effectively laid out in Robert Elder’s Sacred Mirror––have suggested that honor culture and evangelicaism merged in the antebellum period, this paper focuses on challenges that accompanied that merging; namely, within the discourse of honor and shame, one’s peers decided one’s ultimate classification, while the discourse of evangelicalism opened space for self-classification. Evangelical discourses, in short, forged a worldview that offered a useful alternative to the honor-based southern worldview.

[4] Randolph B. Campbell, A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850-1880 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1983), 119.

[5] Robert Elder, The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 1-2.

[6] John Patrick Daly, When Slavery was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 2.

[7] Peter A. French, “Honor, Shame, and Identity,” Public Affairs Quarterly 16, no. 1 (January 2002): 8. See also Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” The American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (February 1990): 74.

[8] The details of Heartsill’s early life were recorded by his brother, John Rankin. J.R. Heartsill Diary, Heartsill Family Papers (Harrison County Historical Museum, Marshall; hereinafter cited as HCHM), 2.

[9] Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom, 9.

[10] W.W. Heartsill, Fourteen Hundred and 91 Days in the Confederate Army: A Journal Kept by W.W. Heartsill for Four Years, One Month and One Day; or Camp Life; Day by Day of the W.P. Lane Rangers from April 19, 1861 to May 20, 1865, Bill Irvin Wiley, ed. (Jackson, Tennessee: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1954),  xiii-xiv; J.R. Heartsill Diary, 2-3, Heartsill Family Papers, HCHM.

[11] Campbell, A Southern Community in Crisis, 19-24.

[12] Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 52, 66.

[13] Johnson Roney III, “Marshall, Texas: 1860-1865” (M.A. thesis, Baylor University, 1967), ii.

[14] Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 23.

[15] There were 11 churches in Harrison County in 1850, 24 in 1860. Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 102-103.

[16] Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 102-106.

[17] National Registration of Historical Places Inventory Nomination Form, First United Methodist Church of Marshall, Texas, Church Documents, (Harrison County Historical Archives, Marshall; hereinafter cited as HCHA).

[18] The First Methodist Church of Marshall, Centennial Edition, HCHM.

[19] The First United Methodist Church, Marshall, “Connections,” September 12, 2011, Heartsill Family Papers, HCHM claims that Heartsill donated one hundred dollars. The First Methodist Church of Marshall’s Centennial Edition, Church Papers, HCHM notes that money was raised through pledge and, because the church was completed as the Civil War began, many subscribers did not fulfill their pledge.

[20] Marshall Texas Republican, “Harrison County Speaks,” December 1, 1860, 1.

[21] Andrew F. Lang, “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession: The Birth of Confederate Nationalism in the Lone Star State,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly114, no. 1 (July 2010): 20-35. See also Texas Republican, December 1, 1860.

[22] Stephen B. Oates, “Recruiting Confederate Cavalry in Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 64, no. 4 (April 1961): 465-466.

[23] Marshall Texas Republican, “Army of the State of Texas,” April 6, 1861, 2.

[24] Elder, Sacred Mirror, 177.

[25] Heartsill, 1491 Days, April 19, 1861, 2.

[26] C. A. Bridges, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: A Filibustering Fantasy,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 44, no. 3 (January 1941): 294.

[27] On Dunlap, see “100 Years of Progress Marked by First Presbyterian Church Members,” The Marshall News Messenger, May 28, 1950.

[28] For Heartsill’s recording of the company’s departure, see Heartsill, 1491 Days, April 19, 20, 1861, 3-5, as well as Heartsill’s reproduction of the Texas Republican coverage of the event, Heartsill, 1491 Days, 21-25. See also, Texas Republican, “Organization and Departure of the W.P. Lane Rangers,” April 27. 1861, 1.

[29] Texas Republican, “Interesting Ceremony,” April 20, 1861, 2.

[30] French, “Honor, Shame, and Identity,” 6-7.

[31] Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 52.

[32] Robert Elder, “A Twice Sacred Circle: Women, Evangelicalism, and Honor in the Deep South, 1784-1860,” The Journal of Southern History 78, no. 3 (August 2012): 592; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 52-53.

[33] Texas Republican, “Organization and Departure of the W.P. Lane Rangers,” April 27, 1861, 1.

[34] Texas Republican, “Organization and Departure of the W.P. Lane Rangers,” April 27, 1861, 1.

[35] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 5.

[36] Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 337.

[37] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 5, April 20, 1861.

[38] Heartsill, 1491 Days, April 20, 1861, 6.

[39] Heartsill, 1491 Days, April 28, 1861, 10.

[40] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 9.

[41] Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 201-202

[42] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 14-15.

[43] Heartsill, 1491 Days, September 23, 28, 1861, 44.

[44] Heartsill, 1491 Days, October 21, 1861, 45.

[45] Heartsill, 1491 Days, January 25, 1862, 51.

[46] Elder, Sacred Mirror, 178.

[47] Texas Republican, February 15, 1862, Letter from W.O. Taylor, 2.

[48] Texas Republican, “Proclamation by the Governor to the People of the State of Texas,” March 29, 1862, 1.

[49] Heartsill, 1491 Days, April 1, 1862, 55.

[50] Heartsill, 1491 Days, May 13, 1862, 80.

[51] Texas Republican, “Party to the W.P. Lane Rangers,” May 17, 1862, 2.

[52] For example, John A. Reesman, “A School for Honor: South Carolina College and the Guard House Riot of 1856,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 84, no. 4 (October 1983): 185-213. See also Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel,” 59-61.

[53] Heartsill, 1491 Days, June 16, 1862, 81.

[54] Heartsill, 1491 Days, June 20, 1862, 81.

[55] Heartsill, 1491 Days, July 12, 16, 1862, 81.

[56] Heartsill, 1491 Days, August 15, 1862, 81.

[57] Heartsill, 1491 Days August 15, 1862, 81.

[58] Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 39.

[59] Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom, 110.

[60] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 90-98.

[61] Heartsill, 1491 Days, January 23, 1863, 103-4; Heartsill, 1491 Days, January 31, 1863, 105.

[62] Heartsill, 1491 Days, February 17, 1863, 109.

[63] Heartsill, 1491 Days, March 9, 1863, 112.

[64] Heartsill, 1491 Days, March 20, 1863, 114.

[65] Heartsill, 1491 Days, February 21, 1863, 109.

[66] Elder, Sacred Mirror, 190.

[67] Heartsill, 1491 Days, April 7, 1863, 117.

[68] Heartsill, 1491 Days, April 29, 1863, 123.

[69] Heartsill, 1491 Days, May 11, 1863, 126.

[70] Heartsill, 1491 Days, May 30-31, 1863, 129.

[71] Heartsill, 1491 Days, June 26, 1863, 133.

[72] Reesman, “A School for Honor,” 204.

[73] Heartsill, 1491 Days, June 28, 1863, 134.

[74]John H Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 191; Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom, 12-14.

[75] Heartsill, 1491 Days, July 5, 1863, 137.

[76] Peter S. Bearman, “Desertion as Localism: Army Unit Solidarity and Group Norms in the U.S. Civil War,” Social Forces 70, no. 2 (December 1991): 321-342.

[77] Heartsill, 1491 Days, November 3, 1863, 283.

[78] Heartsill, 1491 Days, August 1, 9, 1863, 140.

[79] Heartsill, 1491 Days, August 14, 1863, 141.

[80] Heartsill, 1491 Days, September 16, 1863, 149.

[81] Heartsill, 1491 Days, September 19, 1863, 151. The two accounts are very similar, but I used the more polished version for ease of reading.

[82] Heartsill, 1491 Days, September 21, 1863, 223. (Original diary).

[83] Lang, “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession,” 23.

[84] Heartsill, 1491 Days, September 27, 1863, 163.

[85] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 166. One can compare the original on page 279 in the first appendix.

[86] Elder, Sacred Mirror, 116-117.

[87] Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Religious Ideals of Southern Society,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 70, no. 1 (Spring 1986), 9-10.

[88] Since the physical diary containing the revised entries for these dates lost some of its outer pages, it is impossible to tell whether he wrote his November 6 justification during the war or as he was publishing the diary in 1874-76. For November 7 and beyond, however, it is clear that he revised them during the war.

[89] Heartsill, 1491 Days, November 2, 1863, 283. The published version is more eloquent but contains the same sentiment. It appears on pages 170-171.

[90] See, for example, the case of the South Carolina Guard House Riot of 1856, Reesman, “A School for Honor,” 204: “…in the minds of the faculty and the others involved, the students had acted as they were supposed to act when a legitimate authority overstepped its bounds….In short, the students had acted, though imperfectly, as gentlemen whose honor had been challenged.” See also Elliot J. Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” The American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (February 1985): 41: “Men of honor shared freedom and equality; those denied honor were implicitly less than equal––perilously close to a slave-like condition.”

[91] Heartsill, 1491 Days, November 3, 1863, 283. Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell if this entry was edited during the war or in 1874-76. I chose to include in this portion of the narrative because Heartsill relied closely on his revisions for the published version and there is no evidence suggesting that this section is a later addition.

[92] William Williston Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” November 7, 1863, W.W. Heartsill Papers, (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Austin; hereinafter cited as Briscoe Center). One can compare the revised version and the original version in the two appendices, Heartsill, 1491 Days, 284 and 293-94.

[93] Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” November 13, 1863, Heartsill Papers; 1491 Days, 296.

[94]For example, Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” November 15, 16, and 17, 1863, Heartsill Papers. Also found in Heartsill, 1491 Days, 297-98.

[95] Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” November 16, 18 and 21, 1863, Heartsill Papers; Heartsill, 1491 Days, 298 -300.

[96] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 295.

[97] Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” November 14, 1863, Heartsill Papers; 1491 Days, 296, November 14. Compare to the original diary, 1491 Days, November 14, 1863, 285.

[98] Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” November 17, Heartsill Papers; 1491 Days, November 17, 1863, 298-299, Compare to the original in 1491 Days, 286.

[99] Heartsill, 1491 Days, December 20, 1863, 312.

[100] Heartsill, 1491 Days, December 22, 1863, 187.

[101] Heartsill, 1491 Days, December 22, 1863, 192.

[102] Heartsill, 1491 Days, February 18, 1864, 196.

[103] Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 212-215.

[104] Heartsill, 1491 Days, May 23, 1864, 205.

[105] Heartsill, 1491 Days, June 1, 1864, 207.

[106] Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 207.

[107] For the original version, see Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” July 11, 1864, Heartsill Papers. For the revised version, see 1491 Days, 209.

[108] Heartsill, “Diary of William Williston Heartsill,” October 4-15, 1864, Heartsill Papers.

[109] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 225.

[110] Heartsill, 1491 Days, March 10, 1865, 232. On peace rumors, 1491 Days, February 16, 1865, 230.

[111] Heartsill, 1491 Days, March 13, 1865, 233.

[112] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 242.

[113] Heartsill, 1491 Days, May 20, 1865, 246.

[114] Journal of the House of Representatives, Eleventh Legislature, State of Texas, August 7, 1866, 4.

[115] Texas Republican, “Ex Governor Henry A. Wise,”  September 8, 1865, 1.

[116] Roney, “Marshall, Texas: 1860-1865,” 170.

[117] Texas Republican, “Two negro regiments have arrived in Shreveport…”, July 28, 1865, 2.

[118] James Curtis Armstrong, “The History of Harrison County, Texas 1839-1880” (M.A. thesis, University of Colorado,1930), 207.

[119] Campbell, Southern Community in Crisis, 279.

[120] On Scipio McKee, see Carl H. Moneyhon, Texas After the Civil War: The Struggle Of Reconstruction (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 74. On the courthouse incident, see Armstrong, “The History of Harrison County,” 192 and Campbell, Southern Community In Crisis, 283.

[121] Texas Republican, “The Necessity of Organization,” March 7, 1868, 2.

[122] Armstrong, “The History of Harrison County,” 199-200; Methodist Church Construction Contract, Church Documents, HCHA.

[123] Armstrong, “The History of Harrison County,” 203.

[124] WPA, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume XVI, Texas Narratives, Part 3, “Jerry Moore.”

[125] Barbara Leah Clayton, “The Lone Start Conspiracy: Racial Violence and Ku Klux Klan Terror in Post-Civil War Texas, 1865-1877” (M.A. thesis, Oklahoma State University, 1986), 40-41.

[126] Armstrong, “The History of Harrison County,” 205-206. Armstrong’s contradictory tone signals a larger problem in determining the level of violence perpetrated by Marshall’s Klan. Many histories of this period were written after the Klan’s 1920s resurgence, and their authors sympathized with the Klan’s activities. Although Armstrong claims that the Klan was not violent, he noted that Black people fled at the Klan’s appearance.

[127] On the Marshall Tribe, see Carl R. Lemke, ed, Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men (Waco: Davis Bros. Publishing Company, 1964), 323-324, and Robert E. Davis, History of the Improved Order of Red Men and Degree of Pocahontas, 1785-1988 (Waco: Davis Bros. Publishing Company, 1990), 224. On the founding of the Shreveport Tribe, see The South-Western (Shreveport), “I.O. of R.M.”, June 2, 1869, 2.

[128] “William Williston Heartsill 1839-1916: ‘Diarist of the Civil War:’ Merchant, Soldier, Writer, Mayor,” Heartsill Family Papers..

[129] Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 244.

[130] Donald G. Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice,” Black History Bulletin 65-66, no. 1-4 (July-December 2002, January-December 2003), 25-26.

[131] Catherine M. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 129; Elaine Frantz Parsons draws clear and convincing connections between the Reconstruction-era Klan activities and minstrel shows and other theatrical performances. Klansmen recreated the spectacle of theater in their costumes and nighttime terrorizing, suggesting a performative element to their actions beyond Bell’s “political rites.” “Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan,” The Journal of American History 92, no. 3 (December 2005): 819.

[132] Dates for Heartsill’s church roles are difficult to pin down. His daughter recorded that Heartsill was a steward for 50 years and a secretary for 40 years. Since Heartsill died in 1916, it is reasonable to assume that he became a steward sometime around 1866 and then a secretary sometime around 1876. Reflections of Willie ‘Wee Wee’ Heartsill Heilelberg Daughter of W.W. Heartsill, Heartsill Family Papers.

[133] Private conversation with Marshall First Methodist Church secretary, January 9, 2019. The incident was also recounted in The First United Methodist Church, Marshall, “Connections,” September 12, 2011, Heartsill Family Papers. The story also appears in the Historical American Building Survey, First Methodist Church South, 300 East Houston Street, Marshall, Harrison County, TX, No. TX-122, p. 1, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/tx0297/. Note the HABS documentation refers to the bell incident as a “legend,” while the Stephen F. Austin State University Center for Regional Heritage Research lists the bell story as one of the reasons for the church’s historical significance. See “First United Methodist Church––Marshall,” (Center for Regional Heritage Research, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacodoches), http://www.sfasu.edu/heritagecenter/4947.asp.

[134] Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 104.

[135] National Register of Historic Places, “First Methodist Church,” reference number 80004133, section 8, pages 9-11, http://www.sfasu.edu/heritagecenter/images/First_Methodist_Church_NR_File.pdf.

[136] National Register of Historic Places, “First Methodist Church,” 10.

[137] Heartsill, 1491 Days, 172-173, November 6, 1863.

[138] Heartsill, 1491 Days, February 21, 1863, 109.

[139] The Galveston Daily News, November 18, 1876. There is some confusion about when exactly Heartsill was elected Mayor. Some sources claim he was elected mayor as early as 1875, and others claim it was much later. Neither offers any substantiation. This is the only documentation I can find with a definitive date. More importantly, one must wonder how Heartsill was elected if the majority of citizens in Harrison were Black. It is possible that there were more white than Black voters in Marshall, but it is more likely that, as the leader of Marshall’s Klan, Heartsill had a distinct advantage.

[140] The Dallas Weekly Herald, “Marshall,” April 7, 1881, 1.

[141] The Weekly Democratic Statesman, April 6, 1882.

[142] Austin Weekly Statesman, “Department Notes,” June 30, 1887, 1.

[143] Jerome McCown, “County Convention meeting from June 6, 1896,” Scraps of Early History of Marshall and Harrison County, Texas, Briscoe Center.

[144] Fort Worth Gazette, “Organized at Marshall,” March 11, 1892, 8.

[145] “Notes on the Death of Stonewall Jackson,” Heartsill Papers.

[146] Kelly McMichael Stott, “From Lost Cause to Female Empowerment: The Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1896-1966” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas, 2001), 59; Texas Confederate Veterans, Harrison County Monument, https://www.texasconfederateveterans.com/Harrison%20Confederate%20Monument.htm.

[147] Bill Moyer, “Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas,” January 11, 1984, https://billmoyers.com/content/walk-through-20th-century-marshall-texas/.

[148] Jim Fitzgerald, “Centennial Backflash: Marshall Rotary stands firm against the Klan,” The Marshall News Messenger, September 1, 2018. See also Phil Latham, “Klan Marches into Marshall, Changing Lives,” The Marshall News Messenger, April 19, 2009.

[149] Bill Moyer interview with Joe Goulden, “Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas,” January 11, 1984, https://billmoyers.com/content/walk-through-20th-century-marshall-texas/.

[150] Bill Moyer, “Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas,” January 11, 1984, https://billmoyers.com/content/walk-through-20th-century-marshall-texas/.

[151] Bill Moyer interview with Inez Hughs, “Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas,” January 11, 1984, https://billmoyers.com/content/walk-through-20th-century-marshall-texas/.

[152] James E. Butler, “Letter to the Editor,” Marshall News Messenger, April 10, 1979.

[153] Carol Dawson, “Not Black and White,” Texas Monthly, January 1999, https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/not-black-and-white/. For more on integration in 1989, see "Integration of Schools in Marshall," Mrs. Charles Wilson oral history interview with Mrs. Charles Wilson, June 16, 2015, Marshall, TX, Civil Rights in Black and Brown Interview Database, https://crbb.tcu.edu/clips/1318/integration-of-schools-in-marshall.

[154] Dawson, “Not Black and White.”

[155] On Hispanic population growth in Harrison County, see Dawson, “Not Black and White.”

[156] Larry Joe Reynolds, “W.W. Heartsill Camp #2042,” http://www.5thbrigade.org/wwheartsill/index.html.